
Glass "9^ 2'i l(p . 

Book lU 






SHAKSPEEE: 



BIRTHPLACE AND ITS NEIfiHBOEKHOOD. 



"Doubtless Shakspere had seen many a Bottom in the old Warwickshire hamlets ; many 
a Sir Nathaniel playing ' Alissander,' and finding himself ' a little o'erparted.' He had 
been with Snug the joiner, Quince the carpenter, and Flute the bellows-mender, when a 
boy, we will not question, and acted with them, and written their parts for them." 

Froude's History of England, vol. i. ch. i. pp. 69, 70. 



" Shakspere had to be left with his kingcups and clover : pansies — the passing clouds — 
the Avon's flow — and the undulating hills and woods of Warwick." 



Euskix's Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. xx. § 29, p. 373. 



i 




The Tombs in the Chancel. 



SHAKSPERE: 



HIS 



BIRTHPLACE AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD. 



BY JOHN E. WISE. 



ILLUSTRATED BY W. J. LINTON. 




LONDON: 
SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL. 



M.DCCC.LXI. 



Km 



* 



[ The Right of Translation is reserved.} 



LIST OF ILLUSTKATIONS. 



PAGE 



The Tombs in the Chancel — Frontispiece. 
Porch of Trinity Church — Title-page, 

The room in which Shakspere was born 12 

His Father's House in Henley Street 13 

Old Font of Trinity Church 19 

Trinity Church 20 

The Latin School 28 

The Mathematical School 34 

Back of Grammar School, and Guild Chapel 35 

Shakspere's Desk 42 

Charlecote Hall 43 

Autograph and Seal of Sir Thomas Lucy 57 

Stratford, from Welcombe Grounds 58 

Welcombe Thorns 69 

Anne Hathaway's Cottage ........ 70 

Avon at the Weir Brake ......... 75 

Bidford Bridge .......... 86 

The Foot-Bridge at the Mill 92 

At Luddington . 93 

Apple Gathering 102 

The House in Henley Street as Restored . . . . .103 

Honey Stalks . 115 

Bust of Shakspere 116 

Remains of Shakspere's House at New Place 148 

Autograph 158 



CONTENTS. 



CHAP. PAGE 

I. Introductory 1 

II. Stbatfobd-upon-Ayon — The House where Shakspere 

was Born 13 

III. Stratford — The Pabish Church . . . . .20 

IV. The Gbammab School — Chapel of the Guild — New 

Place 28 

V. The Chamberlain's Books, etc., of Stratford — Priyate 

Manuscripts in Stratford 35 

VL Chaelecote Pabk 43 

VLL Welcombe and Snitterfield 58 

VIII. Shotteey 70 

IX. The Ayon — Luddington — Welfobd . . . .75 

X. "Piping Pebwoeth — Dancing Maeston " ... 86 

XI. Wabwickshire Oechaeds and Haeyest Homes . . 93 

XII. The Pboyinctaltsms of Shakspere 103 

XE Shakspere 116 

Glossaey of Words still used in Waewickshire to 

BE FOUND IN ShAKSPEBE 149 

Index 159 



NOTE. 

Whilst these sheets were in the press, the munificent bequest of 2,500Z., 
left, together with an annuity of 60L, by the late Mr. John Shakespear, of 
Worthington, Leicestershire, has been set aside by a decree of the Court of 
Chancery, and the committee for the repairs of the house in Henley Street, 
where Shakspere was born, find themselves liable for a heavy debt. Surely, 
however, the English nation, which loves and reverences its greatest poet, 
will not suffer the people of Stratford long to need assistance for repairing 
the birthplace of Shakspere, when Australia, to her honour, is setting up a 
statue to him in her principal town. 



SHAKSPERE: 



HIS 



BIETHPLACE AND ITS NEIGHBORHOOD. 



CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTORY. 



How often do we hear it said, K How I should have liked 
to have seen Shakspere." Had we seen him, most likely 
we should have found him a man like ourselves, greater 
because he was not less but more of a man, suffering 
terribly from all the ills to which flesh is heir ; and we 
should have been disappointed and said, " Is this all, is this 
what we came out to see?" and proved ourselves in all 
probability mere valets to the hero. It is better as it is ; 
we must be content to let Shakspere have had Ben Jonson 
for a friend, and joyfully to take his testimony, brief as 
that is, — " I loved the man, and do honour his memory, 

1 



2 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was, indeed, 
honest, and of an open and free nature." 

Though springing from an excellent feeling, it is a 
mistaken wish to see with the physical eye the world's 
great men. The least part of a great man is his material 
presence. It is better for us each to draw our own ideal 
of Shakspere ; to picture his face so calm and happy and 
gentle, as his friends declare his spirit to have been ; yet 
not unseared by misfortune and chastened by the divine 
religion of sorrow. It is better as it is. We know not for 
certain even his likeness, or his form. The earth-dress falls 
away, the worthless mortal coil is shuffled off, and only 
what is pure and noble, the essence of all that is great in 
the man, remains for evermore as a precious birthright 
to all the world. 

A more reasonable wish is one, also often heard, that we 

had some diary of Shakspere, some of his private letters to 

his wife or his children, or even a correspondence with Ben 

Jonson. I do not know that even this is to be regretted. 

Ben Jonson's correspondence has been brought to light, and 

alas ! he has been found out to have been a poor government 

spy. And though of Shakspere we can confidently trust, 

That whatever record leap to light, 
He never shall be shamed ; 

yet I still think it better as it is. The gods should live 



INTRODUCTORY. 3 

by themselves. And as was the case with the physical, 
so with the spiritual man, it is best for us to draw our 
own ideal. Of the greatest poets who have ever lived, 
the world knows nothing. Homer is to us only a name. 
Of the singer of the Nibelungen Lied we know not so 
much as that. And yet all that is good and noble of 
them remains to us. We surely will not grudge our 
Shakspere their happy lot. The truest biographer of 
Shakspere, it has been well said, is the most earnest 
student of his plays. Even did we possess the private 
letters and diaries of Shakspere, what use could we make 
of them ? One man only has been born, since Shakspere 
died, fit to write his history, and that man, Goethe, is a 
foreigner. Most biographies, even where the amplest in- 
formation abounds, are mere catalogues of dates, a history 
of what the great man eats and drinks, and whatwithal 
he is clothed. 

To know Shakspere's life would undoubtedly be to 
know one of the highest lives ever lived. To know his 
struggles, for struggles he had, bitter as ever man endured, 
his sonnets alone would testify ; to trace how from darkness 
he fought his way to light, how he moulded circumstances, 
how he bore up against fortune and misfortune, were 
indeed to know a history such as we cannot expect ever 
now to have revealed. 

1—2 



4 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

Still the wish will ever linger that we did possess some 
scraps of information. We ever shall care to know what 
we can about our greatest men; it is the one feeling that 
will last to all time : and this love, this reverence for the 
good and great men of the earth, is amongst the best traits 
in our human nature. I will not blame even that feeling 
which hoards up Garrick cups, and mulberry tooth-picks as 
treasures ; even this, in its way, is a testimony to the infinite 
worth of true greatness. Halliwell and Collier have given 
up their time in searching every record and deed for the 
minutest allusion to our poet ; and the least thing they 
have discovered has been eagerly welcomed. 

But we seem ever doomed to disappointment; not one 
scrap, not a half-sheet of paper of Shakspere's handwriting 
ever turns up : the most painful search adds but little to 
our knowledge ; nothing beyond a name or two, or another 
date or so. His life is at best but a collection of fines and 
leases ; everything connected with his private life perished 
with him ; when he died he carried with him his secret. 
No external history could of course reveal to us the fount 
of his inspiration : that is just as visible now, as ever, to 
the seeing eye, and the sympathetic love of any reader. 
But the man himself, what he did here on earth, how he 
struggled with outward circumstances, and how from being 
the apprentice to a butcher or a woolstapler he rose to become 



INTRODUCTORY. 5 

the writer of Hamlet, we know not. It is idle to say that this 
is of second-rate importance, and that Shakspere's inner life, 
which may be gleaned from his writings, is alone worth 
knowing ; men ever wall wish to know his exterior life. 

I feel that I can add nothing; new to the researches of 
Collier and Halliwell, but I have always thought that 
something might be written better than the present guide- 
books to Stratford. Here w T as Shakspere born, and here 
he died ; here in the archives of the town the only infor- 
mation about him and his family exists ; and here, still 
more important, is the country w 7 here he rambled when a 
boy, and which he loved when a man ; and here people still 
come, day after day, on a pilgrimage to his house, showing 
that hero-worship is not dead, proving that even in these 
days the world pays homage to its great men. 

The aim of this little book is not very high, but if 
it will, in some measure, take away the reproach of 
meagreness from the hand-books to Stratford, and throw 
some little light on the text of Shakspere, by giving the 
reader a better idea of the land where the poet lived, I 
shall be very well content. 

To me it has always appeared a most happy circum- 
stance that Shakspere should have been born in 

That shire which we the heart of England well may call, 

as his fellow-countryman Drayton sings, and that his child- 



6 SHAKSPEKE AND HIS BIBTHPLACE. 

hood should have fallen amidst such true rural English 
scenery ; for it is from the storehouse of childhood that in 
after years we draw so much wealth. Happy indeed was 
it that his home should have been amongst the orchards 
and woodlands round Stratford, and the meadows of the 
Avon. The perfection of quiet English scenery is it, such 
as he himself has drawn in the Midsummer NigMs Dream, 
and The Winter's Tale, and As You Like It, and a hundred 
places. I cannot but hold the theory of the effects of local 
causes on a poet's mind, remembering what the poets 
themselves have said. Coleridge declared that the memo- 
ries of his youth were so graven on his mind, that when a 
man and far away from the spot, he could still see the 
river Otter flowing close to him, and hear its ripple as 
plainly as when in years long past he w T andered by its side ; 
and Jean Paul Richter, when lamenting how greatly the 
absence of the sea had affected his writings, exclaimed, 
" I die without ever having seen the ocean ; but the ocean 
of eternity I shall not fail to see." And just as climate 
modifies the physical condition of a nation, so scenery 
affects the mental condition of a poet. I have no wish to 
strain the theory. I know well that a truth may be so 
overstated that it. at last becomes a falsehood; I know 
too that a poet's mind cannot be tied down to any spot, but 
it takes a colour from everything which it sees, and that 



INTRODUCTORY. 7 

the saying of Thucydides, dvBpwv kiri^av^v ivaaa yrj Tacpoc, 
will bear reversing, and all the earth is as truly the birth- 
place of a great man as his grave; yet still I somehow 
think that the quiet fields round Stratford, and the gentle 
flow of the Avon, so impressed themselves upon Shakspere's 
mind, that his nature partook of their gentleness and 
quietness. 

Take up what play you will, and you will find glimpses 
there of the scenery round Stratford. His maidens ever 
sing of " blue- veined violets," and ec daisies pied," and 
" pansies that are for thoughts," and " ladies'-smocks all 
silver-white," that still stud the meadows of the Avon. 
You catch pictures of the willows that grow ascaunt the 
brooks, showing the under-part of their leaves, so white 
and hoar, in the stream ; * and of orchards, too, when 

The moon tips with silver all the fruit-tree tops. 

I do not think it is any exaggeration to say that nowhere 
in England are meadows so full of beauty as those round 
Stratford. I have seen them by the river-side in early 



* Virgil, who, with all his shortcomings and failings, had a real love for 
Nature, and, as long as he kept to descriptions of her, was always truthful, 
describes the willow somewhat similarly, — "glauca canentia fronde salicta" 
(Georgic ii. 13), though it is a very inferior picture to Shakspere's of the 
leaves reflected in the water. Virgil was probably thinking of the willow- 
leaves when the wind stirred them, making them glisten with silver. 



8 SHAKSPEKE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

spring burnished with gold ; and then later, a little before 
hay-harvest, chased with orchisses, and blue and white 
milkwort, and yellow rattle-grass, and tall moon-daisies : 
and I know nowhere w r oodlands so sweet as those round 
Stratford, filled with the soft green light made by the 
budding leaves, and paved with the golden ore of prim- 
roses, and their banks veined with violets.* All this, 



? The finest part of Drayton's Polyolbion is the thirteenth book, where 
he describes the scenery of his native Warwickshire, and of his " old 
Arden." The following passage will interest the reader as a description of 
the country in Shakspere's time, Drayton being born only one year before 
Shakspere: — 

Brave Warwick that abroad so long advanced her Bear, 

By her illustrious Earls renowned everywhere : 

Above her neighbouring shires which always bore her head, 

My native country, then, which so brave spirits hast bred, 

If there be virtues yet remaining in thy earth, 

Or any good of thine thou bredst into my birth, 

Accept it as thine own, whilst now I sing of thee, 

Of all thy later brood the unworthiest though I be. 



When Phoebus lifts his head out of the watery wave, 
No sooner doth the earth her flowery bosom brave, 
At such time as the year brings on the pleasant spring, 
But Hunt's up to the morn, the feathered sy Ivans sing; 
And, in the lower grove, as on the rising knoll, 
Upon the highest spray of every mounting pole, 
There quiresters are perched, with many a speckled breast: 
Then from her burnished gates the goodly glittering East 



INTRODUCTORY. 9 

and the tenderness that such beauty gives, you find in the 
pages of Shakspere ; and it is not too much to say that he 
painted them, because they were ever associated in his 
mind with all that he held precious and dear, both of the 
earliest and the latest scenes of his life. 

Therefore I repeat, that it was well that Shakspere was 
born here. And I dwell especially upon his love for 
flowers, — a love always manifested by our great poets : 

Gilds every mountain top, which late the humorous night 
Bespangled had with pearl, to please the morning's sight; 
On which, the mirthful quires, with their clear open throats 
Unto the joyful mom so strain their warbling notes, 
That hills and valleys ring, and e'en the echoing air 
Seems all composed of sounds about them everywhere. 
The throstle with shrill sharps, as purposely he sung 
To awake the listless sun, or chiding'that so long 
He was in coming forth that should the thickets thrill; 
The woosel near at hand, that hath a golden bill, 
As nature him had marked, of purpose t' let us see 
That from all other birds his tunes should different be : 
For with their vocal sounds they sing to pleasant May; 
Upon his dulcet pipe the merle doth only play. 
When, in the lower brake, the nightingale hard by, 
In such lamenting strains the joyful hours doth ply, 
As though the other birds she to her tunes would draw. 
But the passage does but faint justice to the sweetness of the birds in the 
Warwickshire woodlands. The reader will remember how, in the Mid- 
summer Night's Dream, Shakspere sings of the nightingale, and the " woosel- 
cock with his orange tawny bill," and " the throstle with his note so time; " 
and they may still all be heard singing as sweetly as ever in * the woods 
around Stratford. 



10 SHAKSPEKE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE, 

by Spenser, and Chaucer, and Milton, who seem to regard 
them with a human sympathy, and to endow them, too, 
with human feelings. So Shakspere loved, as Lord Her- 
bert of Cherbury would have said, " our fellow-creatures 
the plants ; " and so speak Imogen and Perdita of them, 
and so, too, Ophelia. Violets Ophelia would have given 
to her brother ; but they died all, when her father died. 
And I dwell also upon this love for flowers, because we 
^ust remember that God has given them, as it were, as a 
peculiar gift to the poor (that is, to the great body of 
mankind), for their delight and their contemplation. 
Other things they have not — pictures, nor gardens, nor 
libraries, nor sculpture-galleries ; but flowers they always 
have, and it is the contemplation and the love of them that? 
distinguishes us from the beasts of the field. * 

Happy, indeed, therefore, was Shakspere's lot to have 
been born in the country among such scenes ! far happier 

* It is true that Shakspere can paint sea-cliffs, as in Lear ; or mountains, 
as in Cymbeline ; or the sea in a storm, as in the Tempest; but he never 
dwells upon them with that fondness with which he paints his own lowland 
meadows. This must certainly, in a great measure, be attributed to the 
reasons given in the text, but partly also to the fact, that man in Shakspere's 
day had not yet learnt to see a beauty in the clouds, or the wild ravine, or the 
stormy sea. For this insight we must thank our modern poets and painters; 
though we must ever remember that there are touches and lines in Shakspere 
describing mountains and storm, and sunset scenes and clouds, which have 
never been equalled. 



INTRODUCTORY. 11 

than befell liis great fellow-poets, Spenser and Milton, 
both born in the turmoil of London. And surely, too, 
it was well that he was born amongst country rustics, 
and that from the scenes of early life he was able to gather 
strength, and to idealize, without weakening their reality, 
his Christopher Slys, his Quinces the carpenters, and his 
Snugs the joiners, such as we may easily conceive he saw 
and knew in his boyhood. 

I know that it is often brought as a reproach against him 
that he should have drawn them ; but I, for my own part, 
find in this Shakspere's greatest merit, feeling assured 
that there is nothing insignificant in humanity, and that the 
humblest man is by no means the worthless thing generally 
thought. Surely I think, that in painting these rough 
forms so lovingly, we may detect Shakspere's true great- 
ness of mind. And the simple thought that nature has 
made the most numerous of the world's family these same 
so-called common men, might inspire us with a wish to 
know and to love them. By painting them, Shakspere 
could better paint the complexities and troubles of daily 
life, with its hard toil, such as will last as long as the 
world lasts. These things may be in themselves very 
paltry, but they cease to be paltry when we know that by 
them millions of human beings are strangely affected. 

And here let me take the opportunity of saying, what 



12 



SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 



has been often said before, but which cannot be too often 
repeated, that Shakspere's chief excellence lies in this, that 
he has not drawn mere lay-figures, but human, breathing, 
complex men and women — not Romans, not Greeks, but 
simply men; that he has never obtruded mere party 
creeds, but given us true religion; never painted mere 
finite systems, but true perennial human sympathy; and 
that he has never forgotten the broad principle, that 
whether Saxon or Celt, Jew or Gentile, we are all bro- 
thers; that, in fact, to use his own words, he has ever 
" held the mirror up to nature," reflecting there all forms 
and shapes, but reflecting them with the charity that looks 
upon a brother's shortcomings in pity, knowing well how 
utterly impossible it is to judge another. 




The Room in which he was Born. 




The House in Henley Street. 



CHAPTER II. 

STRATFORD -UPON- AVON — THE HOUSE WHERE 
SHAKSPERE WAS BORN. 

This little country town lies in the Yale of the Red Horse, 
so called from the giant figure of a horse cut in the red 
marl on the side of the Edgehills, some twelve miles off, 
and w T hich gives its name, like its fellow on the Berkshire 
hills, to the surrounding country. The Avon, after passing 



14 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

under the walls of Warwick Castle, and through the park 
of Charlecote, widens out broader and shallower as it 
approaches the town, where used to be a ford, still visible 
by the side of the bridge, from which the place takes its 
name, the Saxon prefix of " Strsete " or " Stret " signifying 
a street. 

It is, like most of our English country towns, very quiet 
all the week, but waking into some little stir on market- 
days and fairs. There is nothing about it to attract atten- 
tion; no old gates, no picturesque old buildings, as at the 
neighbouring city of Warwick ; nothing but the Avon, 
and the surrounding country, and the one name of Shak- 
spere. And, since the traveller will only take an interest 
in it as connected with Shakspere, I shall not go into the 
history of the place, but leave that to the local historian, 
and confine myself entirely to what relates to Shakspere. 

The first spot which every one looks for is Shakspere's 
birthplace. It stands in Henley Street; and though there 
is no absolute evidence that he was born there, yet we 
know that his father rented it in 1552, and this, coupled 
with the tradition, makes the fact nearly certain. The 
property was subsequently purchased by his father for 
forty pounds in 1575 ; and from the fine levied at the time 
we learn that it consisted of two messuages, and two 
gardens, and two orchards. In 1597 his father sold a 



THE HOUSE WHERE SHAKSPERE WAS BORN. 15 

small portion of the land for two pounds, and in the deed 
relating to the sale we find him described as a yeoman.* 

The house has passed through many changes ; but 
recently, thanks to the liberality of the late Mr. John 
Shakspere, and to the good taste of the people of Stratford, 
it has been restored to its original state in Shakspere's 
time, and been separated from the surrounding buildings, 
and the garden planted with all the flowers the poet sings 
of so lovingly in his plays. The house is one of the old 
timbered houses that may still be seen standing in many 
parts of the county, with their great beams chequering 
the walls with squares, and their high-pitched gable roofs 
and dormer windows. 

Come, we will go in and see the room where was born 
the man in whose pages live all the poetry, and nobleness, 
and worth of one of the best ages of English history. It is 
but a platitude to say that this room stands before all 
palaces. And as we look at it, and remember that pro- 
bably it was much scantier and smaller, we bethink our- 
selves how little Nature cares for her greatest children. 
She flings them by in obscure corners of the world, leaving 
them to fight their way. In poverty have been born the 
world's greatest men. Homer was born, no one knows 

* Mr. Halliwell, in his accurate Life of Shakspere, gives both the fine 
and this document in full, pp. 34, 37. 



16 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

where ; Socrates was the son of a midwife ; and Newton's 
and Burns's birthplaces were ploughmen's cottages. So it 
has been, and so it will be. The order of the world was 
changed by One born in a manger, and the highest Gospel 
was preached by fishermen ; and States were overthrown 
by a poor priest, preaching only out of the sincerity of his 
heart 

Let us note, too, all the signatures on the walls, and not 
be angry with them, for they are but the expression of a 
true feeling of love and reverence. It is something to 
think of, that here to this room should be drawn all men, 
high and low, rich and poor, to pay homage to the son of a 
yeoman, or, at most, a mere w^oolstapler. While .such an 
influence lasts, the world is on the right road. Princes and 
conquerors, blustering and bullying, pass away; but the 
works of one .genuine man are eternal. 

It would be well if for one moment we could see the old 
Stratford of the sixteenth century; for unless we can throw 
ourselves back into the past, and into its spirit, even Shak- 
spere is meaningless. The street in which he was born 
was still, as now, called Henley Street; ahd consisted, 
nearer the main town, of old, timbered, high-gabled 
houses, squared with black oak beams; but towards the 
other end, where now runs Clopton Lane, was unenclosed 
land. In the High Street stood the houses of the gentry 



THE HOUSE WHERE SHAKSPERE WAS BORN. 



17 



and the richer tradesmen, with their open courts and 
galleries, and their rush- strewn floors, and their wide 
barge-boards, rich with carving. And the Falcon still 
stood where it does now, as a hostelry, with its red lattices. 
And opposite to it was " the Great House" of the Cloptons, 
some day to be the New Place of Shakspere, and the 
Chapel of the Guild, and the Grammar School, with its 
staircase outside, and the Guild Hall beneath it, where 
the companies of players used to perform when the Corpora- 
tion gave an entertainment ; * and somewhat lower down, 
below the timbered almshouses, stood the house of the 
priests of the Guild, with its round dove-tower ; and you 
might just catch a glimpse of the Church of the Trinity, 



* No doubt these entertainments acted strongly upon the mind of Shak- 
spere when a boy, and perhaps gave him his first bias to the stage. The 
following extracts from the Chamberlain's books at Stratford, will interest 
the reader, as showing how frequently the players exhibited. The two 
companies first mentioned performed when Shakspere's father was bailiff. 



1569. Item, payd to the Quene's pleyers . 

Item, to the Erie of Worcester's pleers 
1573. Paid to Mr. Bayly for the Earle of Lecester'i 

1576. Geven my Lord of Warwicke players 
Paid the Earle of Worceter players 

1577. Paid to my lord of Leyster players . 
Paid to my lord of Wosters players 

1579. Paid to the Countys of Essex plears 

1580. Paid to the Earle of Darbye's players 

1581. Paid the Earle of Worcester his players 
Paid to the L. Bartlett his players 







ix.li. 






xije?. 


s players 


vs. 
xvijs. 


viijd. 




VS. 


viijd. 




XVS. 






iijs. 


iiijdf. 




xiiijs. 


\]d. 




viijs. 


iiij. 




iijs. 


iiij. 




iijs. 


8* 




2 





18 SHAKSPEKE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

with its timbered and lead-coated spire; and the crosses 
still stood here and there in the streets.* And the gallants 
moved about the old town in their rich picturesque dresses, 
their doublets of velvet, and their slashed shoes, and their 
ruffles, and their peach-coloured hose. Trade was then 
prospering. The middle-classes of England were for the 
first time growing into importance, and the lower classes 
were far better off than they had ever before been. And, 
going on to more important matters, let us remember that 
now was the day-spxing of Protestantism, and that the 
minds of men were awakening from the deathlike sleep 
that had bound them. The spirit of the Reformation 
could not end where it began, but passed through every- 
thing, altering the whole tendency of English thought. 
Learning and philosophical inquiry now marked a new 
birthday from which men should date. And the poet is 
ever the reflex of all that is noble and good of his time. 
His birth becomes a necessity. For every age must have 

* Two certainly, one in Kother Street and the other at the market cross. 
See Wheler's History of Stratford, p. 109, from which, together with the 
late Captain Saunders' valuable collection of sketches, I have partly drawn 
this description of old Stratford. I ought to mention that the existence of 
the Ealcon rests only upon tradition. The three inns in Shakspere's time, 
" The Crowne," " The Beare," and " The Swanne," were all in Bridge 
Street, as may be seen in an order of the Corporation, dated 18 Dec, 
8 James I. Probably it was one of the ale-houses, of which there were 
thirty within the borough. 



THE HOUSE WHERE SHAKSPERE WAS BORN. 19 

its own poet. And just as spinning-machines were the 
necessity of the eighteenth, so was Shakspere the inevi- 
table outcome of the sixteenth century. The energy of 
that age must be revealed, not alone in defeating Spanish 
Armadas or in Reformations, but in some a3sthetic shape. 
And in the drama Shakspere luckily found ready made 
to hand the materials on which he so impressed the 
patriotism and the high feeling of his day that they will 
live to all time. If we do not understand this, we do not 
understand Shakspere. 




Old Font of Trinity Church 



2—2 




Trinity Church, Stratford. 



CHAPTER III. 



STRATFORD — THE PARISH CHURCH. 



Renowned Spenser ! lie a thought more nigh 
To learned Chaucer, and, rare Beaumont ! lie 
A little nearer Spenser, to make room 
For Shakspere, in your threefold, fourfold, tomb. 

The next spot to which we instinctively turn, after the 
birthplace of Shakspere, is the parish church of Stratford. 
Very beautiful is it, with its avenue of limes and its great 



STRATFORD— THE PARISH CHURCH. 21 

elms by the river-side, their topmost boughs now red in 
the April sun, and the rooks cawing and building in the 
branches, and the Avon flowing close by, with the sound 
of its splashing weir. It is a spot where any poet might 
wish to be buried. And Shakspere lies in the chancel 
close to the river, where, if any sounds reach the dead, 
he might hear the noise of its weir. It is pleasant to 
think of him resting here side by side with his wife, and 
his favourite daughter and her husband. It never makes 
me sad to look at their graves. His was a lot which 
any one might envy — to be laid with those in death whom 
they loved dearest in life. And those lines on his grave- 
stone — 

Good frend, for Jesus' sake, forbeare 
To digg the dust encloased heare; 
Blest be the man that spares thes stones, 
And curst be he that moves my bones ; 

which have for so long passed as unmeaning doggrel, are 
to me inexpressibly beautiful. I do not for one moment 
suppose that Shakspere wrote them ; but I do think that 
whoever wrote and placed them there, felt he was express- 
ing, to the best of his powers, Shakspere's own feelings 
on the subject. They are in accordance with all we know 
of the man — a simple prayer to be left alone in peace 
where some day the dust of all that he best loved would 



22 SHAKSPEKE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

be laid with him. It is the same entreaty that his fellow 
poet, Spenser, utters in the Fairy Queen — 

O dearest God ! me grant, I dead be not defouled. 

B. I, Canto x. 42. 

And as I before noticed how much happier than Milton's 
and Spenser's was Shakspere's lot to be born in the 
country, so, too, do I think it far happier for him to be 
buried in the quiet church of Stratford than, like them, 
in the bustle and roar of London. No poet, perhaps, 
rests so happily as Shakspere. This is better than being 
buried in Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's, to lie at 
peace amongst your own. Goethe rests beside a royal 
duke and Schiller ; but I think Shakspere's a far happier 
lot. Dante sleeps in a marble tomb far away from his 
native Florence, " parvi mater amoris" as he bitterly said; 
but Shakspere rests here under the plain gravestones, 
amongst his own friends and kindred. 

Let us mark also some of the other inscriptions, parti- 
cularly that to Shakspere's favourite daughter Susanna, 
the wife of Dr. Hall :— 

Witty above her sexe ; but that's not all — 
Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall; 
Something of Shakspere was in that, but this 
Wholly of Him with whom she now's in bliss. 

It is not too much to conjecture that this gentleness 



STRATFORD— THE PARISH CHURCH. 23 

and goodness of spirit made her Shakspere's favourite 
daughter. And it is pleasant to know that she placed 
the inscription to the memory of her mother, who lies 
on her husband's right hand, and to know, further, that 
they both earnestly desired to be buried with Shakspere.* 

But it always makes me sad, as I read the date on 
the monument on the wall, to think that almost in the 
prime of life the poet was snatched away, and what 
Hamlets and Lears the world has missed. I hope the 
old tradition is true, that the last play he wrote was the 
Tempest, with its creations " on the skirts of human nature 
dwelling." Above all others this play is built upon the 
firm foundations of spirit, and derives a tragic interest from 
the fact that the poet himself was so soon to be called 
away to that spirit-land. Nor let us forget the bust, 
with its face looking so calm and quiet ; and though 
perhaps it does not realize Shakspere's countenance to 
us, still there is about it a certain quietness and gentleness 
that accords with all that we know of him. " Here is a 
man who has struggled toughly," I always think of Shak- 
spere, as Goethe said of himself; and the smooth, un- 
meaning portraits we have of him, give me not the 

* From a letter written in 1693, from Mr. Dowdall to Mr. Edward 
Southwell, and published under the title of Traditionary Anecdotes of 
Shakspere, London, 1838. 



24 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

slightest idea of the man. The bust, however, was 
sculptured by Gerard Johnson, one of the best artists 
of his day, and erected only seven years after Shakspere's 
death, when his features would still be well remembered ; 
and we must therefore regard it as the only authentic like- 
ness of him we possess. Originally it was coloured, the eyes 
being a light hazel, and the hair and beard auburn. In 
1743 it was repainted, and the old colours were faithfully 
preserved; but in 1793 Malone caused the whole bust to 
be whitewashed by some common house-painter, for which 
he righteously suffered the penalty of the well-known 
epigram.* 

The old parish register is full of entries of baptisms 
and deaths in the Shakspere family, the most important, 
of course, being — "Baptisms, 1564, April 26. Gulielmus 
Alius Johannis Shakspere ; " and yet if you ask where 
is the font where the three-day-born baby was baptized, 
it cannot be shown. When I lived near Stratford, the 
old font was in the possession of a private individual. 
I trust it may be restored to its proper place. For if 
there is any one of whom Protestantism may be proud, 



* Stranger, to whom this monument is shown, 
Invoke the poet's curses on Malone : 
Whose meddling zeal his barbarous taste displays, 
And daubs his tombstone as he marred his plays. 



STRATFORD— THE PARISH CHURCH. 25 

it is Shakspere ; and surely the font where he was sealed 
a member of the Churchy and for which, too, in after 
life he proved himself a faithful soldier, should not be 
allowed to rot to pieces, Milton has in these days been 
discovered to be a Unitarian. But against Shakspere the 
strictest orthodoxy has never brought a single charge. 
Yet if ever there was a man who questioned fate, who 
fought " the cruel battle within," and yet remained faithful, 
it was Shakspere. Never in any of his plays is there the 
slightest symptom of that disbelief which ends in despair 
and mockery. Too large-minded for any one particular 
creed or system, he ever treats not only religion, but 
all things, with the purest spirit of reverence ; and I 
do say that he deserves better of his Church than that 
the font at which he was baptized should be cast aside 
and forgotten. 

There is a monument on the north side of the great 
east window worth looking at, on account of its connection 
with Shakspere, and executed by the same sculptor as his 
own, to the memory of John Combe. He was, as is 
well known, a money-lender, and the story runs that he 
asked Shakspere to write his epitaph, the severity of 
which the miser is said never to have forgiven. But 
the same thought may be found in different shapes in 
literature long before Shakspere's time, and there is pro- 



26 SHAKSPEBE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

bably but little truth in the tradition, as we find John 
Combe leaving by his will five pounds to Shakspere.* 

The church itself is very beautiful, especially when 
seen as I have often seen it by night, the moon lighting 
tip the yellow-gray tower, etching its great black shadow 
on the churchyard, and breaking in soft silver lights upon 
the clerestory windows. Very beautiful, too, must that 
chancel have been where Shakspere lies, when the windows 
were glazed with the forms of saints and angels, and the 
old oak roof hung down with its pendant figures and 
carved statues. But all this sinks into utter insignificance 
when compared with the one fact that this is the church 
where Shakspere knelt and prayed, and where he confessed 
the heavy burden and the mystery of the world. I scarcely 
ever like to put much faith in tradition, but I think we 
may trust the tradition of Shakspere's deeply religious 
cast of thought towards the end of his life. I see no 
reason for disbelieving it. We may surely better accept 
this than the other vile stories we unhesitatingly swallow. 
This much I know, gathered from some little experience, 
that generally speaking, all bad traditions are false, but 

* The common version is that given by Aubrey: — 
Ten in the hundred lies here ingraved : 
'Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved: 
If any man ask who lies in this tomb ? 
Oh! oh! quoth the Devil, 'tis my John a Combe. 



STRATFOKD— THE PARISH CHURCH, 27 

that good traditions ever contain some germ of truth; 
the reason being that human nature is too prone to invent 
not good, but evil report. And through all Shakspere's 
plays, as I before said, there ever shines forth a reverence 
not only for religion, but for the mysteries of life and the 
world. We do ourselves no good by disbelieving this 
account, testified, as I surely think it is, by the evidence 
of the sonnets. And in conclusion I would intreat the 
reader to ponder over this, one of the most beautiful of 
Shakspere's autobiographical poems : — 

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, 

Fooled by those rebel powers that thee array, 
Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth, 

Painting thy outward walls so costly gay? 
Why so large cost, having so short a lease, 

Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? 
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, 

Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end? 
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss, 

And let that pine to aggravate thy store : 
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross : 

Within be fed, without be rich no more : 
So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men, 
And death once dead, there's no more dying then. 

Sonnet 146. 



The Latin School. 



CHATTER IV. 



THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL— CHAPEL OF THE GUILD- 
NEW PLACE. 

Not far from the church stood the College of Stratford, 
whose tithes Shakspere rented, and where John Combe 
lived, but which has long since been pulled down. The 
Grammar School, however, where competent authorities 
say Shakspere must have been educated, still remains. 



THE GEAMMAE SCHOOL, ETC. 29 

It is a long, low building, in the main street, with the 
school-rooms on the upper story, very much altered from 
its original state in Shakspere's time, one of those good 
old grammar schools that have done so much good for 
England. Twenty years ago the old stone staircase, 
roofed over with tile, by which the boys, from the time 
of Shakspere, had ascended to the school-room, was stand- 
ing. But this, too, is gone. Here it was, then, that 
Shakspere was educated ; and in proof of the fact, a 
desk is shown at w r hich he sat ; but we will not inquire 
too closely into the matter. Credimus quia incredibile est 
must be, in the case of the desk, the ground for our 
belief. Ben Jonson tells us that Shakspere knew " little 
Latin and less Greek ; " most probably, like all of us, 
whatever is most valuable, he taught himself. Though 
I, for my part, should be very well content if our grammar 
schools, and all other schools and colleges, would teach but 
"little Latin and less Greek," and more German and 
French. Underneath the school-room is the former Hall 
of the Stratford Guild, where, probably, Shakspere learnt 
more than in the room above, for there, as was said in 
a previous chapter, the various companies of players per- 
formed before the corporation. 

Adjoining the grammar school is the Chapel of the 
Guild, which appears, from an entry in the Corporation 



30 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

Books, in February, 159f, to have been temporarily used 
as the school, and the commentators bring forward the 
passage in Twelfth Night (act iii. scene 2), where Mal- 
volio is described wearing " yellow stockings, and cross- 
gartered, like a pedant that keeps a school i 5 the church," 
as an allusion to the circumstance, which probably is only 
accidental, as there used to be school-rooms in many of 
the old churches, as to this day in the Priory Church 
at Christchurch, in Hampshire. In the chapel there was 
a pew belonging to New Place, and here in Shakspere's 
time the walls were frescoed with paintings, which were 
whitewashed over by the Puritans, and have since fallen to 
pieces.* 

One spot was there which we should all have loved 
more than any other — New Place, where Shakspere passed 
his last days. A clergyman of the name of Gastrell, into 
whose possession it eventually came, annoyed by visitors 
and inquiries, not only cut down the very mulberry- 
tree Shakspere planted, but to save the taxes, razed the 
house itself. I trust he lived to repent of his deed, 

* In Wheler's History of Stratford, pp. 98, 99, 100, will be found an 
account of some of these paintings. Leland, in his Itinerary, says, " Aboute 
the body of this chaple was curiously paynted the Daunce of Death, com- 
monly called the Daunce of Powles, because the same was sometime there 
paynted about the cloysters on the north-west syde of Powles Church, 
pulled down by the Duke of Somerset tempore E. 6." 



THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL, ETC. 31 

and that he some day read how a heathen king, when 
he destroyed Thebes, spared the home of its poet. The 
old house, says Dugdale, in his History of Warwickshire, 
was built by Sir Hugh Clopton, Knt., in Henry VIL's 
reign, " a fair house, made of brick and timber," and in 
Sir Hugh's will was called "the Great House." In 1563 
it passed by sale out of the Clopton family, and was 
purchased in 1597 by Shakspere, who entirely repaired 
and remodelled it, changing the name to New Place. 
The fact of his purchasing the best house in Stratford 
when still young, proves how soon he rose to prosperity. 
Here, too, at the outbreak of the civil war, Henrietta 
Maria kept her court for three weeks. A modern house 
is built on the old site, but in a part of what was Shak- 
spere's garden, with happy propriety, stands the Stratford 
Theatre. To myself there has always seemed something 
very beautiful in Shakspere's coming back to his native 
town to spend the rest of his days among his friends 
and kindred. He was contented and happy with his 
lot, and this "measureless content" is ever the mark 
of true greatness. And in that town where he was 
born he was content to die. And fate ordained, as in 
Raphael's case, that that day which saw his birth was 
alone worthy to see his death. 

As was before said, all the relics of former days have 



32 SHAKSPEEE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

passed away from Stratford. The College and New Place 
are both gone; and the house in Chapel Lane, sold by 
Getley to Shakspere, has been destroyed. There are not 
even any picturesque old houses, that so link us with the 
past, still standing; one only in the High Street, with its 
carved barge-boards and its ornamented corbels under the 
windows, bearing the date of 1596. But the whole town, 
though, is interesting when connected with Shakspere. 

Fairer seems the ancient city, and the sunshine seems more fair, 
That he once has trod its pavement, that he once has breathed its air. 

The very streets speak to us of him. In Timon of Athens 
(act iv. scene 3) occur the following lines : — 

It is the pasture lards the brother's sides, 
The want that makes him lean; 

the meaning of which was a complete riddle to all com- 
mentators. The late Mr. Singer very happily proposed 
" rother's sides," that is, oxen's, obviously the true reading. 
And in Stratford to this day is there a street still called 
Rother Street, and formerly the Rother Market, that is, 
the market for cattle, which is still held there.* Again, 

* To those who are interested in word-lore, the following note may, per- 
haps, be acceptable, about a word still used in Warwickshire, but about 
which so little is known in the dictionaries. Rother is said by Golding to 
mean black cattle, but probably any sort, as it is derived from the Saxon, 
hryther, a quadruped, connected with rowt or rawt, to bellow or low like an 



THE GEAMMAE SCHOOL, ETC. 33 

there is Sheep Street, which is invariably pronounced 
Ship Street by the lower orders. And this pronunciation 
we find in Shakspere. Thus, in the Comedy of Errors 
(act iv. scene 1), Antipholus of Ephesus says to Dromio 
of Syracuse — 

How now, a madman ? Why, thou peevish sheep, 
What ship of Epidamnus stays for me? 

Again, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (act i. scene 1), 
Speed thus laments : — 

Twenty to one he is shipped already, 
And I have played the sheep in losing him. 

And Shakspere in one of his poems actually rhymes the 
word " sheep " as if it were spelled " ship." 

But leaving these minor considerations, let us look 
steadily at the one fact, how a truly noble man can 



ox; as povg, from j3odu). We meet with the word in a petition of Parliament 
from Wotton Basset to Charles L, about "the free common of pasture for the 
feeding of all manner of rother-beasts, as cowes." Again, in the parish 
register of Harbing, Sussex, is an account of " a well-disposed person who 
gave a cow to the inhabitants on their keeping in order a bridge, called 
Bother Bridge." And in Worcestershire and Warwickshire, the manure of 
cattle is still called " rother-soil." The village of Rotherwell, near Horn- 
castle, where the petition to Henry VIH. was drawn up in 1536, and Bother- 
field, a hamlet in Sussex, and the towns of Rotheram and Rotherhithe, 
I may notice, are derived from this word; hithe, in the last compound; 
signifying a wharf. 

3 



34 



SHAKSPEKE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 



ennoble even material things ; can make the very stones 
of the street and the very walls of the houses full of 
romance. It is equally true in another sense than that in 
which it was written — 

Outward forms receive 
Their finer influences from the life within. 

And so the mere name of Shakspere consecrates the old 
town for ever, and fills it with beauty; And he himself, 
though long dead, still speaks, and still continues to shed 
an influence incalculable to all ends of the earth, through 
all time. 




The Mathematical School. 




Back of Grammar School, and Guild Chaoel. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE CHAMBERLAIN'S BOOKS, ETC. OF STRATFORD. — 
PRIVATE MANUSCRIPTS IN STRATFORD. 

Very interesting are the Chamberlain's accounts of Strat- 
ford, for they give us all the reliable information, brief as 
it is, that we possess of Shakspere's family, and as the 
reader is not likely to inspect them, I have determined to 
give a short summary of their contents.* They enable us 

* I here take the opportunity of thanking Mr. W. O. Hunt for his 
repeated kindnesses in allowing me to inspect the corporation books, &c. of 

3—2 



36 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

to see the varying circumstances of Shakspere's father, and 
prove, apart from all other considerations, that Shakspere 
might have been driven by sheer necessity and poverty to 
seek his fortune. The first entry that I shall quote is 
dated January 10, 156f, when his father was one of the 
Chamberlains of Stratford. 

" Item, payd to Shakspeyr for a pec tymbur . iijs." 
We must, of course, bear in mind that the value of money 
was nearly three times as much as it is now. And in a 
meeting of a hall, held January 26 in the same year, we 
find: — 

" Item, at the same hall the chambur ys 
found in arrerage and ys in det 
unto John Shakspeyre . . . xxvs. viijJ." 
Proving not only that Shakspere's father was not in want 
of money, but was a man of some substance. I am not, of 
course, one of those who care in the least, or think it of 
the slightest value, to prove that Shakspere, or his father, 
was " a gentleman born," as the clown in the Winter's Tale 
would say. But I think that this information is important 
when taken in connection with what follows. Again, in 
1565, we find : — 

Stratford, and in giving me any information he was able. The way in which 
they are kept and preserved might be profitably imitated by other corpora- 
tions, who seem often not at all aware of the valuable historical matter to be 
found in their documents. 



THE CHAMBERLAIN'S BOOKS OF STRATFORD. 37 

" Item, payd to Shakspeyr for a rest of 

old det iij7. ijs. vijd" 

" In this accompt the chambur ys in 
det unto John Shakspeyr to be 
payd unto hym by the next cham- 
berlens ..... vijs. iiijrf." 

All tending to prove that John Shakspere was a man 
who could afford to let his money lie by. But his social 
position in the town is still more distinctively shown by 
a list dated the 30th of August, 1564, where we find 
only one burgess giving more than he does for the relief 
of the poor, who were suffering in that year from the 
plague.* Another meeting is held on the 6th and the 
27th of September; and again on the 20th of October, 
when he gave in a similar proportion. All things seem 
prospering with him. In 1569, he is the chief magis- 
trate of Stratford. In 1570, he rents Ingon Meadow 
Farm. In 1575, he buys the property in Henley 
Street. . The tide of fortune then suddenly turns. Three 
years afterwards, we find in the corporation books that 
he, with another alderman, is excepted from paying the 

* Mr. Halliwell, in his Life of Shakspere, gives this and other documents 
in full from the Chamberlain's books, &c. at Stratford, leaving me nothing 
new to add, and to the extreme accuracy of his extracts I beg to testify, 
having compared them with the originals. 



38 SHAKSPEEE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

full levy of srx and eightpence for equipping " three 
pikemen, two bellmen, and an archer/' showing that from 
a prosperous man he was fast declining. Again, later in 
the same year, the state of his affairs is more significantly 
shown by the fact that, in an order for the relief of the 
poor, he is excused from any payment. And in the March 
of the following year, his name is marked as a defaulter for 
three and threepence, the reduced sum which was levied 
on him for purchasing the armour. 

From other sources we know his altered position. In 
1578, he is obliged to mortgage for forty pounds his estate of 
Ashbies, near Wilmecote, which he received with his wife ; 
and in 1579, he sold the interest of his property at Snitterfield 
for four pounds. All things are evidently going wrong. 

Returning, how T ever, to the corporation books, we find the 
following remarkable entry, dated September 6, 1586 : — 

"At thys halle William Smythe and Richard Courte 
are chosen to be aldermen in the places of John Wheler 
and John Shaxspere ; for that Mr. Wheler dothe desyre 
to be put owt of the companye, and Mr. Shaxspere doth 
not come to the halles when they be warned, nor hathe not 
done of longe tyme." 

He is removed; and we meet his name but once or 
twice more. But in a return procured by Sir Thomas 
Lucy we find him in 1592, mentioned amongst other 



THE CHAMBERLAIN'S BOOKS OF STRATFORD. 39 

recusants as staying away from church, for fear of being 
arrested for debt. To this has the prosperous man been 
reduced. It is a sad history. Then suddenly comes the 
wonderful change. In 1596, we find the man, who was 
almost beggared but four years before, applying to the 
herald's office for a grant of arms. There can, I think, be 
but one solution, that the son was now prospering and 
helped him. And this is corroborated by the fact that we 
know that in the following year the poet bought New 
Place. A few more years pass by, and, in 1601, John 
Shakspere dies, having lived to see the success of his son. 
It is, indeed, a strange eventful history. And I have told 
the story in its barest shape, without conjecture or remark, 
just as it may be read in the Chamberlain's and Corporation 
books of Stratford, for it needs no comment, no filling up 
of outlines, to give it pathos and interest. 

And of Shakspere himself, we know less than even this. 
A few anecdotes by Aubrey and others,* all probably with 

* Gossiping old Aubrey's account is as follows: — "Mr. William Shak- 
spere was borne at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick. His 
father was a butcher; and I have been told heretofore by some of the 
neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade; but 
when he kill'd a calfe, he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech. 
There was at that time another butcher's son in this towne, that was held 
not at all inferior to him for a naturall witt, his acquaintance and coetanean, 
but dyed young. This Wm., being inclined naturally to poetiy and acting, 
came to London, I guesse about 18, and was an actor at one of the play- 



40 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

some little glimmering of truth, but all going to prove his 
extreme poverty when first turned adrift in the world ; a 
few obscure passages in contemporary writers, showing 
how quickly he rose to fame, is all that we know of him. 
In a manuscript list of the quantity of corn and malt in 
Stratford, in February, ~ 9 a time of great dearth, we find 
Shakspere possessing the large quantity of ten quarters, 
and learn from the ward in which his name appears that 
he was living at New Place.* In the Chamberlain's books 
for the same year we meet with the following : — 

" Pd. to Mr. Shaxspere for on lod of ston. . . x<i." 
And in a letter of the date of January, *||, preserved 
amongst the documents of the Stratford Town Council, we 
find his name mentioned as likely to purchase land at Shot- 
tery, proving that he was now a man of wealth and means. 
And this, with one or two other incidental notices in other 
letters, is all we know of him. No document belonging to 
Shakspere ever turns up, with one exception, a letter to 
him from Richard Quiney, which, when I last saw it, was in 

houses, and did act exceedingly well. Now, B. Johnson was never a good 
actor, but an excellent instructor. He began early to make essayes at 
dramatique poetry, which at that time was very lowe, and his plays took 
well. He was a handsome, well-shap't man, very good company, and of a 
very readie and pleasant smooth wit," &c. 

* This list, as well as the next letter, is quoted in full by Mr. Halliwell, 
pp. 167, 172. 



THE CHAMBEELAIN'S BOOKS OF STRATFOKD. 41 

the possession of the late Mr. Wheler, of Stratford, and 
which I shall venture to give in full : — 

" Loveinge con trey man, I am bolde of you, as of a ffrende, 
cravinge your helpe with xxx. IL uppon Mr. Bushells and 
my securitee, or Mr. Myttens with me. Mr. Rosswell is 
nott come to London as yeate, and I have especiall cawse. 
You shall ffrende me muche in helpeinge me out of all the 
debettes I owe in London, I thanck God, and muche quiet 
my mynde, which wolde nott be indebted. I am nowe 
towardes the Cowrte, in hope of answer for the dispatche 
of my buyseness. You shall nether loose creddyt nor 
monney by me, the Lorde wyllinge ; and nowe butt 
perswade yourselfe soe, as I hope, and you shall nott need 
to feare, butt, with all hartie thanckefullnes, I wyll holde 
my tyme, and content your ffrende, and yf we bargaine 
further, you shal be the paie-master yourselfe. My tyme 
biddes me hastin to an ende, and soe I committ thys (to) 
yowr care and hope of yowr helpe. I feare I shall not be 
backe thys night ffrom the Cowrte. Haste. The Lorde 
be with yow and with us all, Amen ! ffrom the Bell in 
Carter Lane, the 25 October, 1598. 

" Yowrs in all kyndenes, 

"Etch. Quyney." 

" To my lovinge good ffrend and contreyman Mr. Wm. 
Shackespere deliver thees." 



42 SHAKSPEBE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

This is the only scrap of paper which we know for 
certain that we possess that Shakspere ever read. It is 
a precious document — one short glimpse which we catch 
of the poet. I see not the slightest ground for the conjec- 
ture, which has been founded upon it, that Shakspere at 
one period of his life was a money-lender. " Loving good 
friend/' and €€ loving countryman," is not quite, I should 
suppose, the way in which a usurer would be addressed 
upon money matters at any period of the world's history. 
Nor does the tone of the rest of the note countenance the 
supposition. Better, surely, is it for us to regard this 
letter as showing Shakspere in the light of a friend 
helping a friend, possessed with that love, which is so 
marked in all his writings, and that sympathy which is 
the finest trait in our human nature. 




Shakspere's Desk. 




Charlecote Hall. 



CHAPTER VI. 



CHARLECOTE PARK. 



As I noticed in the first chapter, how happy a circumstance 
it was that Shakspere's birth should have fallen in the 
very heart of England ; so, too, do I think it was no less 
a happy event that it should have happened in the month 
of April, in " the sweet of the year," and that the flowers 
should both be blooming when he was born and when he 
died. It is no mere idle fancy. If there be any truth in the 



44 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

definition that poetry is " the unison of man with nature/' 
then, I repeat, it is a happy event that the greatest poet 
should have been born in nature's sweetest time. As a 
much inferior man to Shakspere, Jean Paul Richter used 
to say, " I, the Professor, and the Spring came together," 
and if he should think this a happy circumstance with 
regard to himself, let us, too, not doubt it with respect to 
Shakspere. 

Therefore, it shall be April when we will go amongst the 
fields — where we know Shakspere must have 'rambled. 
I suppose every one knows the story of the deer-poaching 
at Charlecote Park ; how, so it runs, Shakspere was 
caught in the very act, and brought before the old knight, 
and how, in revenge, the future poet wrote, and fixed to 
the park-gates, some doggerel, of which I can only say 
with the German commentators, that it is more marked for 
Aristophanic abuse than for wit or poetical beauty, and, in 
consequence, was obliged to fly his home. * Well, to-day, 

* There are two versions of this doggerel; the one most commonly known 
purporting to be from the MS. notes of Oldys, is as follows: — 

A parliament member, a justice of peace, 
At home a poor scarecrow, at London an asse; 
If lousie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it, 
Then Lucy is lousie, whatever befalle it: 

He thinkes himselfe greate, 

Yet an asse in his state, 
We allowe by his eares but with asses to mate: 



CHAELECOTE PARE. 45 

on Shakspere's birthday will we go to this old Charlecote 
Park. Our way lies over the bridge across the Avon. 
The sides of the river, close up to the bridge, are fringed 
with large marigolds, with their golden shadows floating 
on the water, and the osier twigs in the aits are tipped 
with budding silver, where the Warwickshire peasant even 
now believes that the swallows hide themselves during the 
winter. The road, for the most part of the way, skirts the 
river-side. On the hedge-banks, the primroses and violets 
are nestling in the warm places, and the hedge itself is just 
dappled with green, whilst here and there the leafless 
boughs of the blackthorn are completely crusted with 
flowers. The wryneck, the cuckoo's mate, as the War- 
wickshire country people call the bird, is singing close to 



If Lucie is lousie, as some volke miscalle it, 
Sing lousie Lucy, whatever befalle it. 

Subsequently, some other modern stanzas were fabricated and joined on 
to this. The other version, said to have been gathered from an old woman, 
by Professor Barnes, of Cambridge, thus runs: — 

Sir Thomas was too covetous, 

To covet so much deer, 
When horns upon his head 

Most plainly did appear. 
Had not his worship one deer left? 

What then? He had a wife 
Took pains enough to find him horns, 

Should last him during life. 



46 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

in an elm ; and the cuckoo himself is calling his name afar 
off. On through the little village of Alveston we pass, 
leaving Alveston pastures to the right, where, later in the 
year, grow columbines, of which Ophelia speaks, blue, and 
purple, and white. And now at last, in the distance, rise up 
the tall elms of Charlecote, and we presently come to a 
footpath which will lead us through an angle of the park. 
This is Charlecote, and the Lucys still live here. It is like 
many more fine old places dotted all over England, and 
it would be, like them, equally unknown and uncared for, 
but for Shakspere. Little could the old knight have ever 
dreamt that, but for that poacher, he would never have been 
remembered. He, too, would have gone the way of all the 
other knights and squires of the Lucys. But now Charle- 
cote and the name of the Lucys will live for ever as 
connected with Shakspere. Singular, too, this poaching 
business in connection with higher matters. But perhaps 
for that one circumstance we should never have had 
Hamlets and Lears. For from all we know of Shak- 
spere, there was no particle of ambition in his mind. He 
wrote not for fame. He cared not even to collect his 
works when written. There they were; care for them 
who might. He was indifferent to all vanity on the 
subject. He simply was content to do his duty in that 
state of life in which his calling lay; and he was first 



CHARLECOTE PAEK. 47 

driven into it not from choice, but, as far as we can tell, 
from sheer necessity. 

Of late years it has become the fashion to throw dis- 
credit on this poaching story. It will not do for Shak- 
spere to be made out a common poacher. No doubt 
whatever, that deer-stealing was a far more venial affair 
than it is now. But, the story itself, if considered as the 
account of a wild youthful frolic, there is no reason what- 
ever to disbelieve. That there is a certain basis of truth 
in it may be gathered from Shakspere's own writings. 
As a young man, he seems to have delighted in those 
sports, in which our forefathers, and, in fact, all English- 
men, have ever been famous. In his earliest piece, the 
Venus and Adonis, he describes a horse in all his points ; 
whilst in the Midsummer Nightfs Dream the hounds are 
equally well drawn. Nor is this the slight matter that it 
may appear. Shakspere's writings are always fresh and 
healthy, and much of this is owing to the free play with 
which he seems to have developed the physical along with 
the spiritual man. Take the description of hare-hunting 
in the Venus and Adonis — 



And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare, 
Mark the poor wretch, to overshoot his troubles, 
How he outruns the wind, and with what care 
He cranks and crosses, with a thousand doubles: 



48 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

The many musits * through the which he goes, 
Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes. 

Sometimes he runs among a flock of sheep, 

To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell; 

And sometimes where earth-delving conies keep, 

To stop the loud pursuers in their yell: 

And sometimes sortethf with a herd of deer: 
Danger deviseth shifts; wit waits on fear; 

Eor there his smell with others being mingled, 
The hot-scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt, 
Ceasing their clamorous cry till they have singled, 
With much ado, the cold fault cleanly out: 

Then do they spend their mouths: Echo replies, 

As if another chase were in the skies. 

By this poor Wat, far off upon a hill, 

Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear, 

To hearken if his foes pursue him still: 

Anon their loud alarums he doth hear: 

And now his grief may be compared well 
To one woe-sick, that hears the passing bell. 

Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch 
Turn, and return, indenting with the way; 
Each envious brier his weary legs doth scratch: 
Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay; 

Eor misery is trodden on by many, 

And being low, never relieved by any. 

This description of the run is wonderfully true ; how the 
"dew-bedabbled wretch" betakes himself to a flock of 



* Gaps in the hedges. f Consorteth. 



CHARLECOTE PARK. 49 

sheep to lead tlie hounds off the scent ; how she stops to 
listen, and again makes another double. Mark, too, the 
beauty and aptness of the epithets, " the hot-scent-snuffing " 
hounds, and the " earth-delving " conies ; but more espe- 
cially mark the pity that the poet feels for the poor animal, 
showing that he possessed a true feeling heart, without 
which no line of poetry can ever be written. 

But returning to the deer-poaching — the matter is, in fact, 
substantiated by the character of Justice Shallow, who 
is evidently drawn from the old Knight of Charlecote, with 
"a dozen white luces" in his coat of arms, which the 
family still bear, though not in quite such numbers. 
Dante we know used to put his foes into hell, and Michael 
Angelo to paint them there, and even Milton alludes to 
his enemies in the Paradise Lost, and surely we may 
excuse Shakspere for taking revenge on his old prosecutor, 
especially in so playful a manner. The first Act of the 
Merry Wives of Windsor is well worth reading, as we 
sit beneath the elms in the park. Here is a passage 
or two which has evidently some connection with the 
place : — 

Master Page, I am glad to see your worship is well; I thank 
You for my venison, Master Shallow. 

Justice Shallow. Master Page, I am glad to see you; much good do it 
your heart ! 
I wished your venison better: it was ill killed. 

4 



50 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

I cannot help thinking that there is a double meaning in 
these last words of " ill killed/' a naive allusion to former 
days, which at the time would be understood by more than 
one living person. The old Justice is drawn in a frank 
and kindly spirit. He loves Master Page : " I love you 
always with my heart : ha ! with my heart." And then they 
fall to talking about Page's " fallow greyhound who was 
outrun at Cotsall," that is, on the Cotswold hills, and still 
so called by the Warwickshire peasant, and which may be 
seen from the roof of Charlecote House. And then 
Falstaff comes and joins them, " who has beaten the 
Justice's men, and killed his deer, and broken open his 
lodge, but not kissed the keeper's daughter ; " but all is 
taken and given in good part. The "hot venison pasty" 
comes in for dinner, and Master Page hopes " we shall 
drink down all unkindness." 

Surely in all this, and in the mention of Falstaff's 
" coney-catching rascalls," there is some allusion to the 
past ; but we will trust with Master Page that the Knight 
and Shakspere drank down all unkindness; at least we 
know Shakspere was not the man to bear malice against 
any one. 

Again, too, in the Second Part of King Henry IV. (act iii. 
scene 2), we meet with the old Justice, who mentions his 
friend, Will Squele, " a Cotswold man ; " and the allusion 



CHAELECOTE PARK. 51 

to the Knight is as marked as ever by FalstafFs saying, 
" if the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no 
reason in the law of Nature, but I may snap at him," 
a luce being a full-grown pike, and snap at him 
FalstaiF does, taking off all his peculiarities in such a 
way as to make him a character that will last for all 
time.* 

And now that we are in the park, let us linger for a 
little. The red gables of the hall peep through the still 
bare elms, where the rooks are cawing above their nests ; 
the Avon flows silently through the park, and troops of 
deer are winding down to its banks ; the place itself in all 
its main features is unaltered from Shakspere's day ; the 
great gates flanked by their stone towers, leading from the 
park into the courtyard, are still standing ; and the house 
itself, the exterior at least, is much the same, with its 
stone-casemated windows, and its octagon towers at each 
corner crowned with their vanes ; and inside the old hall 
still remains with its wide fireplace, and its deep bay 



* This view is also supported by a statement quoted by Mr. Halliwell from 
the MSS. of the Rev. Richard Davies, who died in 1708, at Corpus Christi 

College, Oxford, " that Sir Lucy made Shakspere fly his native country 

to his great advancement; but his revenge is so great, that he is his Justice 
Clodpate, and calls him a great man, and that in allusion to his name bore 
three louses rampant for his arms." 

4—2 



52 SHAKSPEEE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

window blazoned with armorial bearings, in which the 
memorable luces are conspicuous.* 

And as we gaze on the scene, the imagination will go 
back to the old times, and we can see the hawking party- 
setting out in the morning with its long train, and the 
favourite little merlin perched on its mistress's wrist, 
and the falconers with their gyrs and their lanners ; and 
so they pass on under the old elms, never again to be 
seen. 

It is useless speculating on Shakspere's offence, for we 
know nothing but the bare tradition, which, as we have 
seen, has probably some basis of truth. Whether he was 
captured, or what punishment he suffered, we know not ; 
one local tradition, by the way, makes the scene of the 
exploit to have been Fulbrook deer-park, which, as 
Mr. Knight has shown, did not come into the possession 
of the Lucy family till after Shakspere's death. Certain 
it is that this incident, combined, perhaps, with his 
father's declining fortune, caused Shakspere to leave 
Stratford. What he first did in London we know not; 
there is the story that he held horses for people at the 
theatre-doors, but this, like the tale of Homer being a 

* In Dugdale's Warwickshire (Thomas's edition, 1730), there is a view 
given of Charlecote, with its formal gardens, and its rows of trees, and 
straight walks, just as it appeared in Shakspere's day. 



CHAELECOTE PAEK. 53 

beggar and blind, is only a popular exaggeration of bis 
poverty, and the hardships that every poet must go 
through. 

Well, then, as we lie on the grass, let us take up old 
Drayton, who knew Warwickshire well, and thus sings of 
deer-hunting — not at Charlecote, but at Arden, only some 
twelve miles off : — 

How when the hart doth hear 
The often-bellowing hounds to scent his secret lair, 
He, rousing, rusheth out, and through the brakes doth drive, 
As though up by the roots the bushes he would rive: 
And through the cumbrous thicks as fearfully he makes, 
He with his branched head the tender sapling shakes, 
That sprinkling their moist pearls, do seem for him to weep, 
When after goes the cry with yelling loud and deep ; 
That all the forest rings, and every neighbouring place, 
And there is not a hound but falleth to the chase; 
Rechating with his horn, which then the hunter cheers, 
While still the lusty stag his high-palmed head uprears. 

And then, after some more lines of description — how the 
deer takes to the open country, and tries the brooks and 
the ponds — Drayton relates how the ploughman — 

His team he letteth stand, 
To assail him with his goad; so, with his hook in hand, 
The shepherd him pursues, and to his dog doth hollo, 
When, with tempestuous speed, the hounds and huntsmen follow. 

The poor thing next tries the villages, but it is too late : 
he turns in a last effort upon his foes : — 



54 SHAKSPEEE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

The churlish-throated hounds then holding him at bay. 
And, as their cruel fangs on his harsh skin they lay, 
With his sharp-pointed head he dealeth deadly wounds. 
The hunter, coming in to help his wearied hounds, 
He desperately assails : until, oppressed by force, 
He, who the mourner is to his own dying corse, 
Upon the ruthless earth his precious tears lets fall. 

This is vigorous writing, but it is very poor compared 

with what Shakspere puts into the mouth of one of the 

lords in As You Like It (act ii. scene 1), where the scene 

is in the same Warwickshire Forest of Arden : — 

Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out 
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood; 
To the which place a poor sequestered stag 
That from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt, 
Did come to languish ; and, indeed, my lord, 
The wretched animal heaved forth such groans 
That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat 
Almost to bursting; and the big round tears 
Cours'd one another down his innocent nose 
In piteous chase ; and thus, the hairy fool, 
Much marked of by the melancholy Jaques, 
Stood on the extremest verge of the swift brook, 
Augmenting it with tears. 

Mark here how the speaker turns away from the chase 
itself and the excitement of the sport, to the poor animal, 
wounded and dying, and weeping almost human tears; 
and notice too how Jaques invests the whole with a human 
sympathy, explaining and interpreting by it human 
affairs :— 



CHARLECOTE PARK. 55 

First, for his weeping in the needless stream, 
Poor deer, quoth he, thou mak'st a testament 
As worldlings do, giving thy sum of more 

To that which had too much. Then being alone, 
Left and abandoned of his velvet friends : 
' Tis right, quoth he; thus misery doth part 

The flux of company. Anon, a careless herd, 

Full of the pasture, jumps along by him, 

And never stays to greet him. Ay, quoth Jaques, 

Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens, 

'Tis just the fashion. WJierefore do you look 

Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there ? 

This is true poetry, looking upon all things with love and 
pity, that can see nothing suffering pain without profound 
sorrow, and which, too, exalts Nature by making her the 
interpreter of human life and human griefs. 

But we must leave the old park, and go out again into 
the road; and, passing the new church of Charlecote, 
where still remains the white marble effigy of the old 
Justice in full armour, and then on through Hampton 
Lucy, we reach the right bank of the river, and wander on 
towards Hatton Rock. Very beautiful indeed is Hatton 
Rock, with its wood sloping down to the Avon. It is full 
of all the spring flowers — orchisses, and oxlips, and prim- 
roses, as if April had stolen some from her sister May. 
There are white and pink wind-flowers still blossoming, and 
the bluest and sweetest violets, whilst the leaves of the 
bluebell cover the ground with their grass. And all the 



56 SHAKSPEEE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

birds of spring have come here, and loud above them 
all, even in the middle of the day, the nightingale is 
singing ; but the oaks and the ash show not a single bud, 
as if not quite certain that the warm weather had really- 
set in. 

But we must continue our walk under Rheon Hill, and 
so on, still by the bank of the river* The wheat in the 
corn-fields is now about as high as grass at midsummer, 
but of a darker, richer green than ever grass is ; whilst 
the meadows are golden with buttercups. And so, at last, 
we reach the Warwick road, and find ourselves at Stratford, 
and see the flags flying, and hear the bells ringing, in 
honour of the day. 

It is something to ponder on, that men should keep this 
day, and that they should come year after year to the 
annual dinner at Stratford. It may not be a very aesthetic 
mode of celebrating a poet's birthday ; yet men are but 
men, and ordinary mortals but ordinary mortals. It is 
something as it is ; we will not ask for more : it is hero- 
worship in the best way that men at present know. But 
it is something more to rejoice at, that on this night a 
festival in honour of the poet is held some three thousand 
miles away at New York ; and the thought arises, as our 
Saxon language spreads, where will Shakspere's influence 
stop? Already is our tongue lisped in backwoods and 



CHAKLECOTE PARK. 



57 



desert places ; and there, surely, too, will Shakspere some 
day help to conquer the material world : with the Bible and 
with Shakspere we can never go back. 




Autograph and Seal of Sir Thomas Lucy. 




Stratford, from Welcomrje Grounds. 



CHAPTER VII. 

WELCOMBE AND SNITTERFIELD. 

Whilst it is still spring — still " proud-pied April/' as 
Shakspere beautifully calls his natal month — we will wander 
to some more of the places connected with his name. You 
can go nowhere round Stratford that is not associated with 
him. It is to me always a most enjoyable feeling, to know 



WELCOMBE AND SNITTERFIELD. 59 

I am breathing the air that Shakspere breathed, and am 
wandering where he wandered, and where he must have 
felt " all the mighty ravishment of Spring." To-day we 
will go to Welcombe. Our road lies by the back of the 
town, and then through fields, until we reach what are 
called the " dingles " — trenches, most probably, formed, 
in the first place, by natural causes, and then artificially 
deepened. Shakspere must have often come this way, for 
his father possessed property a little farther on, at Snitter- 
field. And here, still in the Welcombe grounds, stand old 
gnarled thorn-trees, to-day just budding, which the poet 
must have seen. They are, above all, worth preserving, 
for they are probably the only trees in the neighbourhood 
old enough to have existed in his time, now that the 
" one elm " boundary-tree on the Birmingham road has 
been destroyed. 

The Dingles and Welcombe are closely connected with 
Shakspere. For it happened that in 1614 an attempt was 
made to enclose them, with other lands at Bishopton and 
Clopton, which Shakspere, who had bought the lease of the 
tithes, and the corporation of Stratford, successfully re- 
sisted. And in a memorandum, dated " 1614, Jovis, 17 
No.," formerly in the possession of the late Mr. Wheler, we 
find that Shakspere told his cousin Greene, the clerk of the 
corporation, who had been sent to London on the matter, 



60 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

that the " dyngles " were not to be enclosed ; * whilst in 
another document, quoted by Mr. Bell, with the date of the 
1st September, 1615, he is represented as saying that "he 
was not able to bear the enclosing of Welcombe." 

To-day everything is full of beauty. The lambs are 
leaping from land to land. The larch's purple tufts are 
just hardening into fir-cones; and the large pale stars of 
the primroses are shining brilliantly on the hedge banks; 
and down in the hedge ditch the arum is lifting its one 
spike, the " long purple " of Ophelia, — 

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name; 

But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them ; 

and by these names is it known to this day to the War- 
wickshire peasant boy and girl.f But the passage is of 



* I trust that the valuable collection of documents referring to Shakspere 
made by the late Mr. Wheler, will be carefully preserved, and never allowed 
to leave Stratford. They are by far the most interesting of any that I know 
in private hands. The memorandum referred to runs as follows: — " 1614 
Jo vis, 17 No. My cosen Shakspear comyng yesterdy to town, I went to 
see him how he did. He told me that they assured him they ment to 
inclose no further than to Gospell Bush, and so upp straight (leavying out 
part of the dyngles to the ffield) to the gate in Clopton hedg, and take in 
Salisburyes peece; and that they mean in Aprill to survey the land, and 
then to gyve satisfaccion, and not before: and he and Mr. Hall say they 
think ther will be nothyng done at all." 

f I know that there are several interpretations of "long-purples." Miss 
Baker, in her excellent Glossary of Northamptonshire Words, conceives it 



WELCOMBE AND SNITTERFIELD. 61 

more value than as a reference to local names, for it shows 
the instinctive delicacy of Shakspere's mind. He will not 
put even into the wicked queen's mouth the gross country 
name. He is as delicate as the most refined lady. 

Come on a little farther, to the brow of the hill, where, 
when Shakspere was dead, was fought one of the skir- 
mishes in the Civil War, and where men have been dug 
up, buried, in hot haste, in their armour, with their swords 
by their sides, just as they fell. Come, we have soon 
reached the top of the hill, and are now in a grass-field, 
where we shall see Ophelia's " crow-flowers," by which 
name the butter-cup (ranunculus bulbosus) is still called in 
Warwickshire, and must not be confounded with the 



to be the purple loosestrife of the river side. I have no doubt whatever that 
this latter bears this name, as well as the arum, but it does not, happily, also 
bear the grosser name. Besides, Shakspere, with his wonderful accuracy in 
describing Nature, would not have mixed the loosestrife, a summer plant, 
with "the crow-flowers, nettles, and daisies/' all of them spring flowers, 
which also is the arum. Some commentators say that the orchis is the 
flower intended; but it is not nearly so like a dead man's fingers as the livid, 
purple, flabby, finger-like flower of the arum. Besides, about Stratford, at 
least, the orchis is always called " king's-fingers." But the names of " dead 
man's fingers and thumb " are common in various parts of the country to 
other plants. Thus, the fumitory is called " bloody man's thumb " in some 
places, and the musk-hyacinth "dead man's thumb," as in the old 
song: — 

Such flowers which in the meadow grew, 
The dead man's thumb and harebell blue. 



62 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

crow-foot {ranunculus arvensis), of which Mr. Tennyson 
writes — 

The cowslip and the crow-foot are over all the hill; 

and which Milton calls "the tufted crow-toe/' the " dill- 
cup" or "yellow-cress" of the more southern counties, but 
which does not bloom till the middle of May. We shall 
find, too, all the flowers mentioned in Lovers Labour Lost 
(act v. scene 2): — 

The daisies pied, and violets blue, 
And ladies'-smocks all silver white, 

And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue, 

Which paint the meadows with delight. 

The cuckoo-buds are still in Warwickshire now, as in 
Shakspere's time — the lesser celandines, which are in full 
bloom when the cuckoo comes. And the ladies'-smocks, 
also, are called cuckoo-flowers, for the cuckoo is a favourite 
bird with the English peasant. And a little later in the 
spring we should see pansies peeping through the grass, 
still called throughout the midland counties, as in the 
Midsummer NigMs Dream (act ii. scene 2), love-in- 
idleness, but in the more southern counties simply, love- 
and-idle. 

To me there is always something very beautiful in the 
names with which the peasants christen their flowers and 
their birds. There is ever something so simple, yet 



WELCOMBE AND SNITTEREIELD. 63 

characteristic, in them, that many of them are poetry itself. 
And in our great poets, we always find their names faith- 
fully preserved, as we have just seen in Shakspere's case. 
Take that most beautiful of all flowers, the wild columbine, 
which formerly grew in such abundance in our English 
woods and pastures, and examine its old name which has 
passed away, of culver-keys, used by Isaac Walton, a true 
prose-poet. It is exactly the same in meaning as the 
scientific term of aquilegia, only far more beautiful and 
expressive, " culver " signifying a dove, and having refer- 
ence to the dove-like flowers taking their flight, as it 
were, away from their nest. And so, through the whole 
nomenclature of English wild flowers, our wake-robins, 
ladies'-tresses, daisies, and cuckoo-flowers, and gossamer 
(still called " gauze o' the summer " in the northern coun- 
ties), were all names given by true poets, who felt the 
meaning and the worth of their beauty. And I dwell 
especially upon this, because in this generation we seem 
to have thrown aside all love for nature, and prefer to 
live, penned up like cattle, in a town, to dwelling in the 
country. I know not how the vast difference can be ex- 
pressed in words between the times when May-day was a 
festival for high and low, and when a May-pole was set up 
in the Strand, and our present day, when London is one 
vast desert of pavement, with red and blackened ramparts 



64 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

of hideous streets, and its outskirts one wilderness of brick- 
fields ; but it is a difference that is sensibly making itself 
felt in our literature. 

Our road still lies through fields, and, leaving Ingon to 
the right, where Shakspere's father, as we have seen, in 
1570 held a small farm of about fourteen acres, called 
Ingon Meadow, we reach Snitterfield, where the poet's 
grandfather and uncle lived, and in the parish register 
may be found entries of various members of their family ; 
and where the Ardens, Shakspere's mother's family, also 
held property, which through his wife came to Shakspere's 
father. Beyond Snitterfield are the " Bushes," now young 
timber, but where probably there have been woods from 
time immemorial. The w^ild daffodil is still shining 
through the bare trees, and violets, and primroses, and 
oxlips are growing so thick together that you cannot help 
treading down thousands as you walk. The place where 
Shakspere's father lived is now no longer known, although 
tradition still points to where his house stood. But I can- 
not help thinking that Shakspere must have known some of 
the haunts round Snitterfield. Here, more beautiful than 
anywhere else, do all the flowers which bloom in his pages 
still blossom. I have seen these woods, early in the cold 
days of February, just in the spaces where the trees had 
been cleared, covered with celandines, making a golden 



WELCOMBE AND SNITTEBFIELD. 65 

sunshine on the ground when none was to be seen in the 
heaven; and then, when these were all gone, the earth 
was snowed over with white wind-flowers ; and as these 
went, new beauty came, for now the ground was paved 
with clumps and tufts of primroses and patches of wood- 
violets ; and when these, too, were gone, the hyacinths 
arose, encircling the trunks of the trees in a blue haze ; 
and so one growth of beauty was ever succeeded by 
another, still more beauteous. I can never go into these 
woods in the spring time without thinking of that wondrous 
description in the Winter's Tale (act iv. scene 3) : — 

O Proserpina, 
For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou let'st fall 
From Dis's waggon !— daffodils, 
That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim, 
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, 
Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses, 
That die unmarried, ere they can behold 
Bright Phoebus in his strength — a malady 
Most incident to maids. 

Mark the whole passage. How wonderfully accurate it is ! 
Every flower is mentioned in the order it grows. No idle 
word-painting, either, is there : no superfluous, common- 
place epithets ; no colour is laid on for mere colouring's 
sake, but everything goes to the very essence of the matter. 
You can see at once that the writer is describing, not for 

5 



66 SHAKSPEKE AND HIS BIKTHPLACE. 

mere description's sake, but from his pure, deep love of 
beauty. The daffodils are simply the early flowers, that 
come before the swallow, marking the advent of both, their 
earliness being their chief characteristic — blooming when 
nothing else blooms. And the violets, they are dim, that 
is, dimly seen among their green leaves ; and their essence 
is not their colour — not blue or purple, as inferior poets 
would have called them — but their sweetness : " sweeter 
than e'en Cytherea's breath." Milton, in a well-known 
passage, calls the violet " glowing ; " but there is no dis- 
crepancy between the two poets : one is describing the 
budding violet, scarcely seen amidst its green foliage, and 
the other the full-blown flower, quite purple and bright in 
the sunshine. And of the primroses, he notes of them, as 
Milton does, that they die so soon ; not that they actually 
do, for they last as long as any flower, but because we are 
so sorry to lose them, that the time they have been with, us 
seems so very short. He calls them pale, as he does also in 
Cymbeline, probably for two reasons : first, because they 
are pale, when compared with the deep gold of the celan- 
dine, close to which they so often grow; and secondly, 
because round Stratford a red variety is found, and 
the country-people, to distinguish them, as in other 
parts of England, call them respectively red and white 
primroses. 



WELCOMBE AND SNITTERFIELD. 67 

Through these " Bushes/' too, runs the old lane, where 
Charles II. rode, disguised as Jane Lane's servant, in 
flight after the battle of Worcester, and to this day one 
portion of the lane is called King's Lane, and not many 
years ago the peasant would have pointed you out an oak 
under which the fugitive is said to have taken shelter. 
But the old lane is now nearly destroyed, and we shall do 
better to try the fields. So, leaving the farm-house of 
Cummings behind us, with its gorse cover, now golden 
with blossoms, we find ourselves once more on the same 
ridge of hills of which Welcombe is a continuation. Let 
us sit here on the stile for a little while. It is the most 
beautiful, but least known, of all the views round Stratford. 
I could sit here for hours. Below us lies the real country 
of Shakspere, outrolled like a map. Take away the canal 
and the two railroads, and it is essentially the same that 
Shakspere saw. The hills are the same. And Avon 
rolls on the same through the midst. And the same gray 
clouds come moving day after day across the heavens ; 
and the sun sets down the same. 

Let us look at it once more, for it is as beautiful a 
picture of quiet English scenery as can be found anywhere, 
and when joined with the name of Shakspere, becomes 
doubly beautiful. No one, I suppose, could look upon 
ThermopylsB without feeling some glow of patriotism, and 



68 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

no one, surely, can look upon this scene without experi- 
encing some feelings of poetry. Before us rise the Cots- 
wold Hills, with their outlyer, Meon, with its " copped " 
head, to use a word of Shakspere's, its sides still covered 
with wood; and, more to the right, Binton, with its 
mounded terraces, under which the Avon flows, fettering 
hamlet to hamlet with its silver links; and, farther off, 
the long%ack of Bredon ; and, still farther, the two peaks 
of Malvern, cleaving the clear air. And nearer to us lies 
Wimpcote, where Shakspere's mother lived, and where his 
father held the farm of Ashbies : and Shottery, nestling 
amongst elms ; whilst Stratford and its church are steeped 
in the golden sunlight. 

Well, we must now return to the old town. The path- 
way goes down the hill, and then by the side of high 
hedges, where the wild pear and apple-trees are now 
blossoming; one of the most striking features in spring- 
time of Warwickshire and the Midland districts. On 
through Lower Clopton, and then crossing the lane, past 
Clopton House, of which John Combe's daughter was 
once the mistress. The house has been entirely rebuilt, 
excepting a portion of the back, where the curious old 
entrance-gate still stands, and under which Shakspere and 
John Combe may often have passed. On down Clopton 
Lane, and so into the main road, where stood the "one 



WELCOMBE AND SXITTEKEIELD. 



69 



elm," a parish boundary mark, which we know by parish 
documents was standing in Shakspere's time. But it has 
been destroyed. We really seem in these days to have 
lost all reverence for the past. Heme's oak at Windsor 
was cut down, either through negligence or wilfulness. 
And now this old elm is gone. It might have been spared 
as long as it would stand, to have yearly put forth its few 
green leaves, and that the passer-by might have said, 
" Shakspere saw this tree." 




"Welcombe Thorns. 




Anne Hathaway 's Cottage. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



SHOTTEEY. 



If there be one place more interesting than another in 
connection with Shakspere, it is the little hamlet of 
Shottery, for here he found his wife. It lies but a few 
fields' length from Stratford— one of the prettiest of Eng- 
lish villages. Very lovely is it always in April — in " the 
winter of the blackthorn/ 5 as the Warwickshire country- 



SHOTTERY. 7 1 

people call the season. It consists of but a few cottages 
and farm-houses, straggling here and there, with their gar- 
dens full of flowers. The white snowdrops, and the crocuses 
that had fringed the beds with a border of flame, are all 
gone, though a few daffodils still remain ; but the oxlips, 
and the primroses, and the jonquil on its slender rush, 
are shining bright, whilst the turk's-cap lilies, and the 
tulips, and the columbines, are all springing tip, covering 
the earth with their green leaves, and the apple-trees are 
just opening their pink rose-buds, and the pears and the 
cherry-trees are covered with their wdrite May blossoms. 

At the far end of the village, down in a little valley, 
where runs the village brooklet, stands Anne Hathaway's 
cottage. An old, long, timbered house is it, its front 
chequered with squares, where the vine now stretches its 
cane-coloured naked arms, its stones crusted with moss, 
and its thatch, too, green with tufts and clumps of moss. 
Inside it is nothing more than a simple English cottage, 
with its high mantel-shelf ornamented with a bright row r 
of candlesticks and earthenware, and its clean floor of 
Binton stone, sunk and cracked in places. And its garden 
is simply an English cottage garden, such as you may 
see thousands of in Warwickshire, but still none the 
less beautiful, with its well and its wallflowers, and its 
lavender-shrubs, and kitchen herbs. And behind stands 



72 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

a small orchard, which, if it be an early season, will be 
a mass of pink blossom, whilst the meadows beyond are 
covered with cowslips. 

All this was here in Shakspere's time. There was the 
same beauty in the old world as is now. Nothing can 
alter that. And, doubtless, to Shakspere this place and 
these fields were, above all others, the most beautiful, for 
he had seen them through the inspiration of love. 

Upon Shakspere's house doubts have been thrown, but 
upon this no shade of suspicion rests. The traveller can 
believe with a full faith that here Shakspere, when a 
young man, came and won his wife. It is something 
to think of, that Shakspere's helpmate — the woman who 
above every one else influences a man's life for either 
extreme good or utter evil — here dwelt. I cannot enter 
into that barren controversy as to who she was, or what 
her father might be, but of this do I feel certain, that 
she influenced Shakspere's mind for good, and not for 
harm. There is, I know, that base theory, for I can 
call it nothing else, that Shakspere and his wife lived on 
bad terms. Yerily the world is hard upon its greatest 
men. And what is the foundation for this belief? Simply 
because in his will Shakspere left her only his second 
best bed. Perhaps from husband to wife there was no 
more precious bequest: the bed whereon they had slept 



SHOTTERY. 73 

for years, where their children had been born to them, 
and where they themselves might hope to die in peace 
and quietness. I would myself sooner believe in the 
creeds of South Sea Islanders than in such utter baseness 
of thought. If there is one thing Shakspere dwells upon 
more than another it is the duty and love of husband 
and wife, and of children to parents. To suppose that 
he w r as at variance with his wife, is to suppose that he 
must have ever been giving the lie to his own thoughts. 
The man who asked — 



What nearer debt in all humanity 
Than wife to husband? 



was the man who could best answer the question. There 
really does seem a sort of epidemic of base belief, among 
men, which loves to traduce the world's heroes. If one 
thing be certain, it is that Shakspere was a good man — 
including under it a good husband. It is no paradox to 
say that a good poet must be a good man. The reason 
(Vernunft) can only flourish with moral truth. It is as 
true now T as it was two thousand years ago, that rj apzrri 
7roir]Tov Gvvi'CzvKTai rrj rov av9p<l)7rov, kcli ovk oiov ts 
ayaQov yeviaOai ttoi^ttiv fxri rrporepov yev7]9evra avSpa 
ayaOov. Not until the experiment of brambles bringing 
forth figs succeeds, will the still greater miracle of a bad 



74 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

man writing true poetry come to pass. For poetry is, 
after all, nothing but the reflex of the spiritual nature 
of a man. And I feel sure of this, that Shakspere's vast 
superiority over his fellow-dramatists sprang not so much 
from his intellect as from his higher moral power. 

Even Ulrici and the best German critics fall into this 
common error of Shakspere living on bad terms with his 
wife, perhaps not knowing, as Mr. Knight first showed, 
that she was already provided for by her dowry, and 
there was therefore no occasion for her to be mentioned 
in his will. There is, however, direct testimony of at 
least her love for her husband, which has been previ- 
ously quoted, in her affecting and touching wish to be 
buried with him in his grave. 

To suppose that Shakspere and his wife had no griefs, 
no embitterments, is to suppose what never happened to 
two people on this earth. But griefs, if wisely taken, 
only the more endear affection ; and that was, no doubt, 
the use to which Shakspere turned his trials and afflictions. 
Life, whether wedded or unwedded, is action springing 
from suffering; and the greater the man, and the finer 
and tenderer his conscience, the more he realizes this 
truth. 




Avon at the Weir Brake. 



CHAPTER IX. 



THE AVON— LUDDINGTON — WELEORD. 



We must wait till midsummer to go by the side of the 
Avon, for then it is in its greatest beauty. So, on some 
warm day in June will we go. There is a path on both 
sides of the river, but we will pass over the foot-bridge 
at the mill, and ascend " the cross of the Hill," for here 
we shall find a spot curiously connected with Shakspere. 



<6 SHAKSPEKE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

" I beseech you, sir/' says Davy to Justice Shallow, in 
the second part of King Henry IV. (act v. scene 1), a to 
countenance William Visor of Wincot against Clement 
Perkes of the Hill ; " to whom the Justice replies : " There 
are many complaints, Davy, against that Visor ; that Visor 
is an arrant knave on my knowledge." Now the Cherry- 
Orchard Farm, close to which we are, is still called the 
Hill Farm ; and whoever lives there is to this day spoken 
of as Mr. A., or Mr. B., of the Hill, and is so named 
from time immemorial in the Weston parish register. 
Whilst Wincot is still the name of a farm some three 
miles to the left, where, probably, there was once a village, 
the same Wincot where Christopher Sly runs fourteen- 
pence in debt with Marian Hacket for "sheer ale," or 
rather " Warwickshire ale," as Mr. Collier's corrector 
proposes, and of which reading I suppose all Warwick- 
shire people will approve.* Depend upon it all these 



* In Cokain's Small Poems, published in 1658, may be found a curious 
epigram, addressed to Mr. Clement Fisher, of Wincot, referring to 
Christopher Sly: — 

Shakspere your Wincot ale hath much renown'd, 
That fox'd a beggar so (by chance was found 
Sleeping), that there needed not many a word 
To make him believe he was a lord : 
But you affirm, and in it seem most eager, 
'Twill make a lord. as drunk as any beggar. 



THE AVON — LUDDINGTON — WELFOKD. 77 

people really existed — good Justice Shallow, and Davy 
his servant, and Marian Hacket and her daughter Cicely, 
at Wincot ale-house, and Clement Perkes of the Hill, and 
many a laugh would they and Shakspere have at these 
scenes. 

I know how dangerous it is to theorise on such points 
as these, and that Shakspere never drew mere individuals 
but always types of men. Still I cannot help thinking 
that good, gossiping Aubrey might have hit upon the 
truth when he tells us that Shakspere drew his characters 
from the different persons that he met ; and adds that the 
Constable in the Midsummer NigMs Dream (he probably 
meant either Dogberry or Verges in Much Ado about 
Nothing) was drawn from a certain constable at Grendon, 
in Buckinghamshire, where Shakspere stayed one Mid- 
summer night on his road from London to Stratford. 
We have already seen that he drew his Justice Shallow 

Did Norton brew such ale as Shakspere fancies 

Did put Kit Sly into such lordly trances? 

And let us meet there for a fit of gladness, 

And drink ourselves merry in sober sadness. 
Norton is said to have been the landlord of the Falcon Inn, at Bidford, 
famous for being the scene of Shakspere's well-known drinking bout, where 
Sir Aston Cokain and his friends used also to meet. It may have been 
from some confusion about this sonnet and the Falcon Inn, that the popular 
tradition, mentioned a little further on in the text about the Induction to 
the Taming of the Shrew, had its origin. 



78 SHAKSFEKE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

from the old knight at Charlecote, and in the Oldys MSS. 
it is said that the character of Falstaff was drawn from 
a fellow-townsman of Shakspere's ; and popular tradition 
in Warwickshire asserts that the Induction to the Taming 
of the Shrew had its origin in a joke played off by some 
member of Sir Aston Cokain's family upon a tinker in 
Shakspere's time. This may have been the case, but 
the joke is an old one, and to be found in literature long 
before. But it is worth while noting, with Mr. Halliwell, 
that many of the names in Shakspere's plays, such as 
Bardolf, Fluellin, Sly, Heme (or as it stood in the first 
draft of the Merry Wives of Windsor;, Horne), Page, 
Ford, &c, may all be found in the corporation books of 
Stratford, and were the names of people living there in 
Shakspere's day. 

Perhaps, though, this mention of the " Hill Farm " and 
Wincgt so close together, and the satire upon Justice 
Shallow, is the most marked instance of Shakspere alluding 
to matters which may be supposed to be generally known 
at the time. But in his plays there are other places in 
the neighbourhood of Stratford mentioned. I have alluded 
to Master S lender's speaking of " Cotsall," the pronuncia- 
tion still in vogue by the peasantry for the Cotswold hills. 
So, too, when mentioning Kenilworth, in the Second Part 
of King Henry VI. (act iv. scene 4), we find Shakspere 



THE AVON — LUDDINGTON— WELFORD. 79 

calling it by the old term of Killingworth, a pronunciation 
which the common people still adopt. So, too,, in the 
Induction to the Taming of the Shrew, the village of 
Burton Heathy where Christopher Sly was born, should 
probably be written Barton-on-the-Heath, a small village 
some ten or twelve miles from Stratford, and most probably 
the place meant by Silence in the Second Part of King 
Henry IV. (act v. scene 3), where he speaks of " good- 
man Puff of B arson/' the popular corruption of Barton, 
in the neighbourhood. That Shakspere should have 
alluded to his native county, and to the places amongst 
which he spent his earliest days, was but natural. That 
in his exile in London he still loved them, we know from 
Aubrey's evidence, for he used to go " to his native countrey 
once a yeare ; " and from the fact that when he had made his 
fortune he retired to his birthplace to spend his last days. 

But, on the other hand, we may be sure that wherever 
Shakspere travelled, or wherever he was, he worked up 
all he saw into his poems. No colour in the sky, but 
he painted it on his canvas; no tree or flower, but he 
grafted its beauty on his verse. No old snatch, or saw, 
or "trivial fond record," which he heard, but, like his 
own Hamlet, he copied it within " the book and volume 
of his brain." The old tradition, that he was a miser, 
and saved up every penny, would be far more applicable 



80 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

to the riches of his mind. He saved and hoarded up all he 
saw or heard, and he acted just as he makes Pandarus say, 
in Troilus and Cressida (activ. scene 4) — "Let us cast away 
nothing, for we may live to have need of such a verse." 

We must now, though, after this long digression, come 
back to the river across the fields, and we shall find our- 
selves at the Weir Brake, a wood which covers the high 
banks of the Avon at its first reach from the foot-bridge. 
, There is a tradition that this was the scene of the Midsummer 
NigMs Dream. I am willing to believe it, for I do not like 
rooting up such old beliefs. The place is quite beautiful 
enough for such a scene ; only do not ask me to believe too 
literally, for the poet's mind wanders over all space, un- 
consciously gathering up all things it has ever seen or 
heard, and fusing them into a whole. The trees reach 
down from the high banks to the edge of the water, and 
the green fern-plumes wave themselves whenever a little 
breeze steals through the branches ; and the people about 
here still believe, as in Shakspere's time, that the fern-seed, 
gathered with certain rites on Midsummer-day, can make 
them invisible. 

Very beautiful, indeed, is it about Midsummer, as we 
stand on the top of the bank, looking towards Stratford 
Church in the distance, and the river winding beneath our 
feet, just seen through the wood, where the vetchling 



THE AVON— LUDDINGTON— WELFORD. 81 

climbs up the green may-bushes, , pulling her purple 
blossoms along with her ; and the wind blows the sweet 
scent from the bean-fields, and the laughter of the hay- 
makers tedding out the hay. Surely it is a place beautiful 
enough to have inspired the Midsummer NigMs Dream, 
and we will not too closely question the tradition. 

There is, too, another tradition which I give only upon its 
own value, that at the old moated manor-house at Rad- 
brook, about three miles off, there used to be a large 
library, — and many people still living can remember the 
books there fifty years ago, — where Shakspere used to retire 
to study. The old hall has long since been converted into 
a farm-house, and I have never been able to learn the fate 
of the library. 

But we must leave the Weir Brake ; our path, though, 
still lies by the side of the river lined with willows. Past 
the railroad, and Stoneyford, and the river Stour, we go ; 
very lovely about a month later, or even now if it is an 
early season, is each reach of the river fringed with thick 
purple spikes of the loosestrife, and the blue flowers of the 
meadow geranium, and here and there in the swampy 
places the yellow flag-flowers are shining, and the river itself 
is almost dammed up with great green islands of reeds and 
rushes, through which the water flows so slowly, and from 
which the reed-sparrow is ever singing, and close to them 

6 



82 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

are floating the water lilies with their broad green leaves, 
and their golden stars. 

And now at last we are opposite Luddington, where it 
is said Shakspere was married. The church has long since 
been destroyed, and not only the church, but its register, 
and that only a few years since, and so all traces of the 
event are lost. We next pass the little church of Weston 
Sands, and so reach Welford; where there still stands a 
high Maypole in the village painted with red and white, 
and from seeing which we may better understand poor 
Helena's speech to Hermia, in the Midsummer NigMs 
Dream (act iii. scene 2) : 

How low am I, thou painted Maypole? speak; 
How low am I? 

Perhaps we can never rightly understand Shakspere, 
unless we can throw ourselves back into the England of 
Shakspere's time, when May-day, and Whitsuntide, and 
sheep-shearing were real festivals, to all of which there are 
such constant allusions in his plays. And even the 
Midsummer NigMs Dream we can but faintly comprehend 
in comparison with those who first saw it performed, and 
who really believed that there was a visible world of fairies, 
and elves, and pyxies around them, and that on that very 
night they possessed unusual spells over men. 



THE AYON — LUDDINGTON— WELFORD. 83 

Here at Welford luckily the parish register is still in 
existence, and from it I shall venture to give an extract of 
a flood which happened in Shakspere's lifetime, as I believe 
it has never been published before except in a work which 
is now very scarce : * — 

"On the 18th day of July, 1588, in morning, there 
happened about eight of the clock, in Avon, such a sudden 
floode, as carried away all the hay about Avon. Old 
Father Porter, buried about four years past, being then 
a hundred and nine years of age, never knew it so high 
by a yard and a half. Dwelling in the mill-house, he, in 
former times, knew it under his bed, but this flood was a 
yard and a half in the house, and came in so suddenly that 
John Perry's wife was so amazed that she sate still till she 
was almost drowned, and was well nigh beside herself, and 
so far amiss that she did not know her own child when it 
was brought into her. It braike down Grange Mill ; the 
crack thereof was heard at Holditch. It braike up sundry 
houses in Warwick town, and carried away their bread, 
beef, cheese, butter, pots, pans and provisions, and took 
away ten carts out of one town, and three wains, with the 
furniture of Mr. Thomas Lucies, and broke both ends of 



* The Shaksperian Repository, a work which, I believe, only reached two 
numbers. 

(V-2 



84 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

Stratford Bridge. That (flood) drowned three furlongs 
of corn in Thetford field. It was so high at the height 
that it unthatched the mill, and stocked up a number of 
willows and salles, and did take away one (of) Sales's 
daughters of Grafton, out of Hilborrow meadow, removing 
of the hay-cock, that she had no shift but to get upon the 
top of a hay-cock, and was carried thereupon by the water 
a quarter of a mile well nigh, till she came to the very last 
bank of the stream, and there was taken into a boat, and 
all was liked to be drowned, but that another boat coming 
rescued them soon. Three men going over Stratford- 
bridge, when they came to the middle of the bridge they 
could not go forward, and then returning presently, could 
not get back, for the water was so risen, it rose a yard 
every hour from eight to foure, that it came into the 
parsonage of Welford Orchard, and filled his fish-poole, 
and took away the sign-post at the Bare ; it carried away 
Edward Butler's carte, and which was soon beneath 
Bidford, and it came into the vicarage of Weston, and 
made Adam Sandars thence remove, and took away half a 
hundred pounds of hay." 

I would beg the reader to remark at the commencement 
of the extract the beautiful expression of Avon, without 
the personal article, as if the river were a friend, and not 
an inanimate object, a mode of speaking still in use among 



THE AVON— LUDDINGTON— WELEORD. 85 

the peasantry. The account of the poor miller's wife not 
knowing her own child, when it was brought, is very 
touching; and the whole shows that life in the sixteenth 
century was much the same in respect to its joys and 
sorrows as life is now. I hardly like to hazard a con- 
jecture on a subject about which the best commentators 
cannot agree ; but perhaps the date of this flood may help 
to fix the date of the Midsummer Nights Dream, and that 
when Shakspere wrote, — 

The winds, piping to us in vain, 
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea 
Contagious fogs ; which falling in the land, 
Have every pelting river made so proud, 
That they have overborne their continents : 
The ox has therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain, 
The ploughman lost his sweat ; and the green corn 
Hath rotted, ere his youth attained a beard : 
The fold stands empty in the drowned field : 
The crows are fatted with the murrain flock. 

He may have had this flood and its disastrous conse- 
quences in his mind. The Midsummer NigMs Dream, 
though not amongst the earliest series of Shakspere's plays, 
is, from the internal evidence of style, an early work, and 
the first draft of it may have been produced soon after 
1588, when Shakspere would be in his twenty-fifth year. 




Bidford Bridge. 



CHAPTER X. 



"PIPING PEBWORTH — DANCING MARSTON." 



I suppose there is no one who does not know the story 
that Shakspere having gone over to Bidford, on a drinking 
bout, was overcome with the Bidford ale, and spent the 
night on his road home under a crab-tree, and in the 



"PIPING PEBWORTH— DANCING MARSTON." 87 

morning, being asked to renew the contest, refused, saying 
that he had drunk with — 

Piping Pebworth, Dancing Marston, 
Haunted Hillborough, and hungry Grafton; 
With dodging Exhall, Papist Wixford, 
Beggarly Broom, and drunken Bidford. 

I suppose the story, with different variations, will be 
told wherever Shakspere's name is mentioned. We hear 
so little about him authentic, that we make up for it by 
believing in the silliest tradition. It may, or may not, 
have been true. Drinking bouts or contests were very 
frequent in those days, and there is no reason for sup- 
posing that Shakspere, when a young man, should have 
been proof against their temptations. I dare even say 
that Shakspere, as Anthony Wood quaintly says of 
Skelton, " was guilty of certain crimes as most poets 
are." But to suppose that Shakspere was a drunkard is 
an absurdity self-refuted. It is like that other foolish 
tradition handed down on the authority of the good gos- 
siping old vicar of Stratford, the Rev. John Ward, that 
Shakspere died from a fever contracted by drinking. The 
shallower the theory the deeper it impresses itself on 
men's minds. No doubt, Shakspere, as we all do, fell into 
temptation. Life is, after all, a lesson, taught us by our 
mistakes ; but it is from rising after every fall, and not 
grovelling on the ground, that we learn wisdom. 



88 SHAKSPERE A1STD HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

Since these doggerel lines are so interwoven with Shak- 
spere's name, we may as well go to the places mentioned. 
And we will go in the autumn, that we may then have 
seen the country in each season of the year. The places 
all lie so scattered, that we cannot take them in the order 
given in the lines. 

We will begin with Dancing Marston, or Marston sicca, 
a long straggling village, about two miles from Welford, 
where we stopped at in the last chapter. The lines have 
at least the charm of truth about them, for, to this day, 
Marston is celebrated for dancing, and I believe that 
even now, a band of morris-dancers, with their proper 
costumes, could be collected in the place. But Marston 
is known for other things beside dancing. Here Charles 
the Second, after the battle of Worcester, took refuge, at 
the Manor House of the Tomes', in whose family it still 
remains, and where the well-known incident of his turning 
the jack took place. The jack may to this day be seen, 
and the village tradition will tell you, how " the king fled 
into the kitchen, hard pursued by the Parliamentary 
soldiers, and the loyal kitchen-maid, to- save his life, set 
him to turn the jack. The soldiers broke in after him. 
The King in his fright looked round ; but the loyal maiden, 
still faithful, hit him on the back with the basting-ladle, 
adding, ' Now, go on ; and mind your w r ork.' " The 



"PIPING PEBWORTH— DANCING MAKSTON. 89 

blind, so the story runs, was effectual, and the soldiers 
departed.* 

There is a footpath across the fields to Pebworth. The 
corn about here is still uncut, although both stalk and ears 
are of a deep orange, and wave across the country like a 
molten sea of gold. Very sweet now is the walk through 
the fields by the hedgeside, where the briony, with its deep 
bright green leaves, is climbing the hedge, covered with its 
clusters of berries, and where the long bramble shoots and 
sprays stretch over the path, still blossomed with gray and 
pink flowers, and the ditch is matted with heriff and tangle- 
grass and ladies' bedstraw, and the first dewberry, with 
which Titania feeds Bottom, shows its dark purple berry 
silvered over with a delicate frost-like bloom. 

A few fields bring us to "Piping Pebworth," which still 
keeps up its reputation for music. There is nothing to 
detain us here. And, so rambling over more fields, we 
reach the old Roman Icknield Street, which will lead us 
across the Avon into Bidford, still, I believe, as famous as 
ever for its love for good ale. Here at the Falcon, now 
turned into a poorhouse, is a room still shown as the scene 
of the famous festivity. Following the Stratford road for 
about a mile, we shall reach on the right-hand side, the 

* For the more authentic account, see The Boscobel Tracts, edited by 
J. Hughes. London, 1857. 



90 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

place where the crab-tree stood. It perished from natural 
decay in 1824, and nothing marks its site but an old gate- 
post. However, the view from here will well repay us. 
Before us spreads the vale of Evesham, the most fertile, 
perhaps, in England. The country here, which is always 
earlier than any other, is now in the middle of harvest. A 
fresh breeze, though, is blowing, here and there in play 
knocking down a sheaf, as if it were a huge nine-pin, and 
rustling the crab-apples down from the hedge-row trees, 
and blowing about the young second broods of birds that 
are taking their first lessons in flying ; but, best of all, 
breathing cool upon the brows of the toiling harvestmen, 
and the poor harvestwomen, their backs aching with 
picking up the bundles after the reapers, whilst the Avon 
flows so silently down the valley. 

The other places mentioned in the rhyme are all mere 
villages. Broom is called " beggarly," both from the 
poverty of its soil and its inhabitants ; and " Papist " 
Wixford, still, I believe, belongs to the old Roman 
Catholic family of the Throckmortons. "Haunted" 
Hillborough is now a mere farmhouse by the river-side, 
quite lonely enough to have the credit for being haunted. 
It was formerly an old manor-house, and is but little 
changed from what it was in Shakspere's time, with its old 
barns, and its old round-stone dove-house. " Dodging" 



"PIPING PEBWOKTH— DANCING MARSTON." 91 

Exhall, as I venture to write, instead of the usual " dadg- 
ing " Exhall, is, I must suppose, so called on account of the 
trouble there is to find it. I know that the first time that 
I went there, I was several hours before I could reach the 
place, and then, to use an Hibernicism, never found it ; 
unless two or three straggling cottages make the village. 
The prettiest place of them all is " Hungry" Grafton, or 
Temple-Grafton, as it is also called, where some of the 
old Knights Templar once lived. But where their dwell- 
ing was, there is nothing now but a farmhouse standing 
very prettily amongst its elms, and you may trace by the 
mounds and hollows in the adjoining meadow, where had 
once been the fishpools of the old Knights. The epithet 
" hungry " is still true of the soil, which is very poor ; and 
a farm in the parish, to this day, bears the name of 
Hungry Arbour Farm. There is little to be seen in the 
village but a few houses built of the blue lias stone of the 
district. We will go on. A quiet village footpath through 
the meadows, by the side of a brook, which flows down to 
the Avon, will bring us out into the Stratford road.* 

But it is not these places alone that should interest us. 
It is the whole country. And as we go on to Stratford, 

* Por those who take a greater interest in the tradition of the Crab-tree 
than I can persuade myself to feel, a work has been published, entitled, The 
Legend of Shakspere's Crab-tree, by C. F. Green. London, 1857. 



92 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

let us now and then stop, and look back, and watch the 
Autumn sunset fading behind us upon this our last walk, 
as Shakspere often must have seen it ; flake upon flake of 
cloud burning with fire behind the Binton Hills, and casting 
their rosy shadows to the far East, as if there another sun- 
rise was dawning upon us instead of night. And let us, 
too, rising from Shakspere even up to higher things, re- 
member, with some of that feeling of patriotism which so 
marks his plays, that this was the land, where at Edgehill, 
the first battle in the great struggle for English liberty was 
fought, in — 

His native county, which so brave spirits hath bred. 



The Foot-Bridge at the Mill. 




At Luddingtcn. 



CHAPTER XL 



WARWICKSHIRE ORCHARDS AND HARVEST-HOMES. 

I remarked in the first chapter how happy an event it was 
that Shakspere should have been born in the centre of 
England, amongst its pastures and its orchards. No poet 
has such a love for nature as Shakspere; and it is this 
deep, true love for her that ever gives him such a freshness, 



94 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

and a healthy tone. Take the invocation to Ceres in the 

Tempest (act iv. scene 1) : — 

Ceres, most bounteous lady, thy rich leas 

Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats, and peas ; 

Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep, 

And flat meads thatch'd with stover, them to keep ; 

Thy banks with peonied and lilied brims, 

Which spongy April at thy 'hest betrims, 

To make cold nymphs chaste crowns ; and thy broom groves, 

Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves. 

Or his various descriptions of shepherd's life in As You 

Like It, and other plays, but especially the famous one in 

the Third Part of King Henry VI (act ii. scene 5) : — 

O God! methinks it were a happy life, 
To be no better than a homely swain; 
To sit upon a hill, as I do now, 
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point, 
Thereby to see the minutes, how they run; 
How many make the hour full complete, 
How many hours bring about the day, 
How many days will finish up the year, 
How many days a mortal man may live. 
* * * * 

Ah, what a life were this ! how sweet ! how lovely ! 

I suppose no one would wish to prove from these pas- 
sages that Shakspere was either a farmer or a shepherd, 
nothing beyond his love for nature and his knowledge of 
country scenes. And it is this love for nature that makes 
him ever paint her so faithfully and accurately; never 
suffering him to degenerate into any common-place or bald 



WARWICKSHIRE ORCHARDS, ETC. 95 

epithet. Thus, in the first passage above quoted, he calls 
April " spongy," and in the same play, the briars are 
" toothed," not merely prickly, or sharp, as ordinary poets 
would have written, but literally "toothed," with their 
teeth-like fangs. The leaves with him are not merely 
green, but " velvet" {Love's Labour Lost, act iv. scene 3), 
thus giving their very texture and quality. So, again, in 
the Midsummer NigMs Dream (act iii. scene 2), the choughs 
are riot merely garrulous, or talkative, but " russet- 
pated ; " and in the same play, the bee is not " humming," 
or " busy," but " red-hipped ; " or, as we find him calling it 
in All's Well that Ends Well (act iv. scene 5), " red-tailed." 
And so I could go on heaping up instances of his wonderful 
faithfulness of detail in all his drawings of nature. And 
rising, too, above this mere accuracy of description, let me 
add, that he also saw into what has been well called " the 
open secret " of the universe hid beneath each flower, and 
each thing, without seeing which, all sight is blindness. 

But just now, my object is to point out his allusions, not 
so much to nature, as to certain country matters. Sheep- 
shearing, and May-day, and Whitsuntide Festivals, and 
Harvest-homes are all alluded to in his pages. Nay, many 
things are spoken of, both by him and all the Elizabethan 
dramatists, which can only be understood by one who 
has long dwelt in the country. And here I am not 



96 SHAKSPEKE AND HIS BIBTHPLACE. 

going into any descriptions of the beauty of the Midland 
orchards, but am in a most prosaic manner about to treat 
of their fruity which may, perhaps, throw some little light 
on some passages in his plays. Take, for instance, the 
Clown's speech in the Winter's Tale (act iv. scene 2), " I 
must have saffron to colour the warden-pies. 59 To this 
day, in the Warwickshire hedge-rows, the warden-pear, or 
" hard-warden," as it is more commonly called, still grows. 
It is of a dark green colour, when hanging on the tree, 
but, when kept, turns after Christmas to a deep yellow 
tinge. A peasant once gave me the following graphic 
description of it : — " It is a winter pear, rather long at the 
6 snout' end, and narrowish at the f stuck' end." A warden- 
pie is, to this day, in Warwickshire, called a warden-cob, 
and consists merely of a warden-pear wrapped in a coat of 
paste, and then baked, forming a most primitive dish. 

So again, too, in the Second Part of King Henry IV. 
(act v. scene 3), ' Davy serves Justice Shallow with 
" leathern-coats," or leatheran coats as they are now called, 
an apple peculiar to the neighbourhood of Stratford. A 
very old tree of this species was standing, till recently, at 
Weston Sands, from which other young trees have been 
raised. The fruit is still highly valued, possessing a fine 
white pulp, of a delicate acid flavour, beneath its thick, 
tough rind, whence it derives its name, sometimes to be met 



WARWICKSHIRE ORCHARDS, ETC. 97 

with in the more southern counties, under the forms of 
" leather-jacket," " buff-coat," and " russetine." 

Other apples, too, mentioned in his plays, are found 
round Stratford. Thus, in the dialogue between Mercutio 
and Romeo (Romeo and Juliet, act ii. scene 4) :- — 

Mercutio. I will bite thee by the ear for that jest. 

Borneo. Nay, good goose, bite riot. 

Mercutio. Thy wit is a very bitter-sweeting ; it is a most sharp sauce. 

Borneo. And is it not well served unto a sweet goose? 

This species is still grown, especially at Cleeve and 
Littleton, where it is now prized as a cider apple. It 
might, with more propriety, be called a " sweet-bitter/' than 
its present country name of " bitter-sweet," for its flavour is 
at first sweet, and afterwards of a very astringent bitter. 
The minute allusion to its use as a sauce, which is still the 
case, I would note as an instance of Shakspere's observance 
in the commonest things. 

Again, too, in the First Part of King Henri/ IV. (act iii. 
scene 3), we find Falstaff complaining that he is "withered 
like an old apple-John;" and in the Second Part (act ii. 
scene 4) we find two drawers thus conversing : — 

First Drawer. What the devil hast thou brought there ? Apple- 
Johns ? Thou knowest, Sir John cannot endure an apple- John. 

Second Drawer. Thou sayest true. The prince once set a dish of apple- 
Johns before him, and told him, there were five more Sir Johns: and, putting 
off his hat, said, " I will now take my leave of these six dry, round, old, 
withered knights." 

7 



98 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

This very apple which gave so much offence to Falstaff, 
may still be found at " Dancing " Marston ; but only one 
tree remains, like that of the leather-coat at Weston Sands, 
quite prostrate with age ; and another at Bishopton, but 
the species is fast wearing out and becoming very scarce. 
The fruit is red and ruddy, of good quality, and in perfec- 
tion in September. The common notes upon this passage 
say that it is " an apple which will keep two years," the 
very reverse of the case, altogether missing the prince's 
joke, wfiich likens Sir John to his red and ruddy name- 
sake, which so soon becomes old and withered. 

There is also, I may notice, in Warwickshire, a species 
of crab, called crabrJohn and crab-Jack, which will keep 
almost for years, and is used by the farmers for puddings in 
winter time, and also mixed with pears in making perry, 
being very juicy, but too sour by itself to make cider ; but 
it must not be confounded with Shakspere's apple- John, of 

which Philips says : — 

Its withered rind, entrenched 
By many a furrow, aptly represents 
Decrepit age. Cider, B. i. 

thus corroborating the fitness of the prince's simile.* 

* Steevens appositely quotes a passage from the Ball, by Chapman and 
Shirley :— 

" Thy man Apple-John, that looks 
As he had been a se'nnight in the straw, 
A-ripening for the market." 



WAKWICKSHIRE ORCHARDS, ETC. 99 

Again, too, in the same play (act v. scene 3) we find 
Shallow, in his house in Gloucestershire — only the other 
side of the Avon — saying to Falstaff, " You shall see mine 
orchard, where in an arbour we will eat a last year's 
pippin of mine own grafting, with a dish of carraways ; " 
which do not, of course, mean the comfits of that name, 
as most of the notes say, but the carraway-russet, an 
apple still well known, both in the midland and southern 
counties, for its flavour and its good keeping qualities. 
So, too, in Love's Labour's Lost (act iv. scene 2), we meet 
the old pedant Holofernes talking about the " pomewater, 
who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of coelo, the sky, 
the welkin, the heaven, and anon falleth like a crab on the 
face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth;" which is 5 in 
its way, an excellent description, for the pomewater is a 
large apple, looking very tempting on the tree, but, in 
reality, excessively sour.* 

And now for a few words about Warwickshire harvest- 
homes, when, as Shakspere says : — 

The Summer's green is girded np in sheaves, 
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard. 

Every one will remember the description in the Winter's 

* Alluded to in the old ballad, Blue Cap for Me :— 

" Whose cheeks did resemble two roasting pomewaters." 

7—2 



100 SHAKSPEKE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

Tale (act iv. scene 3) of the sheep-shearing supper, which, 
by the way, Shakspere has most unaccountably placed, 
when — 

The year's growing ancient — 
Not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth 
Of trembling winter, — 

instead of at the latter end of the spring. Well, sheep- 
shearing suppers are out of date, but this passage — 

Fie, daughter! when my old wife liv'd, upon 
This day, she was both pantler, butler, cook; 
Both dame and servant; welcom'd all; serv'd all; 
Would sing her song, and dance her turn: now here 
At upper end o' the table, now, i' the middle, 
On his shoulder, and his: her face o' fire 
With labour; and the thing she took to quench it, 
She would to each one sip, — 

might to this day stand as a description of a harvest-supper 
at some of the old Warwickshire farm-houses. And at 
such feasts some short snatches of the songs found in 
Shakspere's plays may still be heard. Many of them turn 
upon the same subject as Ophelia's, and it is rather diffi- 
cult to separate the dross from the gold without injury 
to the sense. In one that I have heard occur the very 
lines : — 

Then up he rose, and donned his clothes, 
And dupped the chamber door. 



WARWICKSHIRE ORCHARDS, ETC. 101 

And in answer to the entreaties of the maid, which are 
word for word with Ophelia's, — 

You promised me to wed ; 
the faithless swain replies, — 

I ne'er will wed with any one 
So easily found as you; 

which is the same in sense as the lines in Hamlet And 

in another song, touching on the same subject, the 

treacherous lover tells the forlorn maiden, — 

Go home to your father's garden: 
* * * * 

For there's a herb in your father's garden, 

Some will call it rue : 
When fishes fly, and swallows dive, 

Young men they will prove true. 

It is the same sad rue, the "herb o' grace o' Sundays," 
which Ophelia reserves for herself. I have but little doubt 
that Shakspere heard many of the songs, which he has 
from memory transcribed into his plays, sung at wakes and 
festivals. " Let us cast away nothing, for w r e may live to 
have need of such a verse," he writes in Troilus and 
Cressida ; and the songs that old Autolycus sings in the 
Winter's Tale, Shakspere may, perhaps, have picked up 
from some strolling pedlar, and improved with his own 
thoughts.* 

* I subjoin, for the sake of comparison, an ordinary pedlar's song, from 
Munday's Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington (act iii. scene 1), with 



102 



SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 



Autolycus's, in the Winter's Tale (act iv. scene 3). The reader will at 
once see how Shakspere has idealized the theme. Eirst, for Munday's: — 



What lack ye? what lack ye? 
What is it you will buy? 
Any points, pins, or laces, 
Any laces, points, or pins ? 
Eine gloves, fine glasses, 
Any busks or masks, 
Or any other pretty things? 

And now for Shakspere's: — 

Lawn, as white as driven snow; 
Cyprus, black as e'er was crow; 
Gloves, as sweet as damask roses ; 
Masks for faces, and for noses; 
Bugle-bracelet, necklace-amber, 
Perfume for a lady's chamber; 

What a difference there is even in 



Come, cheap for love, or buy for 

Any coney, coney skins? [money. 

Or laces, points, or pins? 

Eair maids, come choose or buy; 

I have pretty poking-sticks, 

And many other tricks, [money. 

Come, choose for love, or buy for 

Golden quoifs, and stomachers, 
Eor my lads to give their dears; 
Pins and poking-sticks of steel; 
What maids lack from head to heel. 
Come buy of me, come: come buy, 

come buy ; 
Buy, lads, or else your lasses cry. 

the very rhythm of the lines? 




Apple Gathering. 




The House in Henley Street as Restored. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE PROVINCIALISMS OF SHAKSPERE.* 

It would have been singular that Shakspere, being born 
in Warwickshire, should not have used some of its pro- 



* Some small portion of the matter in this chapter, and more in the 
Appendix, has appeared in a paper I contributed to Eraser's Magazine for 
October, 1856, and which the kindness of the editor has enabled me to use 
again. It has, however, all been entirely rewritten, and may be considered 



104 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

vincialisms, or made some allusions to his native county, 
I have pointed out a few of the latter in some of the 
preceding pages ; but this chapter I will devote to some 
of the more striking phrases found in his plays, and which 
are still to be heard in the mouths of the Warwickshire 
peasantry, who, now more than anybody else, 

Speak the tongue 
That Shakspere spake. 

, If Shakspere's own style and manner, which is undoubtedly 
the case, has had a marked influence on subsequent writers, 
and even on the English language itself, still his native 
county left some traces of its dialect even upon him. 

Johnson, himself born in a neighbouring county, first 
pointed out that the expression ."a mankind witch," in 
the Winter's Tale (act ii. scene 3), was a phrase in the 
Midland counties for a violent woman. And Malone, too, 
showed that the singular expression in the Tempest (act i. 
scene 2), " we cannot miss him," for, " we must not miss 
him," was a provincialism of the same district. I do not 
wish in any way to dogmatize on the subject, or to affirm 
that the following phrases and expressions are to be found 

as quite new, both in form and by additions in substance. And here let me 
take the opportunity of thanking my friend Mr. R. F. Tomes, for the great 
assistance he has given me in this chapter, and without which it would 
never have been written. 



THE PROVINCIALISMS OP SHAKSPERE, 105 

nowhere else but in Shakspere or Warwickshire. But 
it is, though, interesting to know, as was shown in a 
previous chapter, that the Warwickshire girls still speak 
of their " long purples," and a love-in-idleness ; " and that 
the Warwickshire boys have not forgotten their " dead- 
men's fingers ; " and that the " nine men's morris " is still 
plaj-ed on the corn-bins of the Warwickshire farm stables, 
and still scored upon the greensward; and that Queen 
Titania would not have now to complain, as she did in the 
Midsummer Nights Dream, that it was choked up with mud ; 
and that " Master Slender " would find his shovel-board 
still marked on many a public-house table and window-sill; 
and that he and "Master Fenton,"and "good Master Brook," 
would, if now alive, hear themselves still so called. 

Take now, for instance, the word " deck," which is so 
common throughout the Midland counties for a pack of 
cards, but in Warwickshire is often restricted to the sense 
of a " hand " of cards, and which gives a far better inter- 
pretation to Gloster's speech in the Third Part of King 
Henry VI. (act v. scene 1 ) : — 

Alas, that "Warwick had no more forecast, 
But whiles he thought to steal the single ten, 
The king was slyly fingered from the deck: 

as, of course, there might be more kings than one in the 
pack, but not necessarily so in the hand. The word 



106 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

" forecast/' too, both as verb and noun, I might notice 
as being very common throughout both Warwickshire and 
the neighbouring counties.* 

Again, in Autolycus's song, in the Winter's Tale (act iv. 
scene 2) : — 

The white sheet bleaching on the hedge, 

With heigh! the sweet birds, oh, how they sing, 

Doth set my pugging-tooth on edge, 
For a quart of ale is dish for a king. 

All the commentators here explain " pugging-tooth " as a 
thievish tooth, an explanation which certainly itself requires 
to be explained ; but most Warwickshire country people 
could tell them that pugging-tooth was the same as pegging 
or peg-tooth, that is, the canine or dog-tooth. " The child 
has not its pegging-teeth yet," old women still say. And 
thus all the difficulty as to the meaning is at once cleared. 
But there is an expression used both by Shakspere 
and his contemporaries, which must not be so quickly 
passed over. Wherever there has been an unusual dis- 
turbance or ado — for I prefer using plain country words to 
explain others — the lower orders round Stratford-on-Avon 
invariably characterize it by the phrase, " there has been 

* This word " forecast " is also used by Spenser, and others of Shakspere's 
contemporaries ; and, though obsolete, except amongst the peasantry of the 
midland districts, is, I perceive, still employed by the best American 
authors. 



THE PROVINCIALISMS OF SHAKSPERE. 107 

old work to-day/' which well interprets the porter's allu- 
sion in Macbeth (act iii. scene 3), " If a man were porter 
of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key," which is 
simply explained in the notes as "frequent/' but which 
means, far more. So, in the Merchant of Venice (act iv. 
scene 2), Portia says, " We shall have old swearing," that 
is, very hard swearing ; and in the Merry Wives of Windsor 
(act i. scene 4), we find, e( Here will be an old abusing of 
God's patience, and the king's English ; " and in the Second 
Part of King Henry IV. (act ii. scene 4), " By the mass, 
here will be old utis." And so also, in Much Ado About 
Nothing (act v. scene 2), Ursula says, " Madam, you 
must come to your uncle ; yonder's old coil at home : " and 
to this day, round Stratford, is this use of " old " still kept 
up by the lower classes. 

Again, there is another expression very common in 
Warwickshire, of " being in a person's book," which must 
not be confounded with the modern phrase of " being in a 
person's good book." The common people always still use 
the phrase without the qualifying epithet. Thus, in the 
Taming of the Shrew (act ii. scene 1), in the bantering 
scene between Kate and her lover, Petruchio jestingly 
says, in reply to her observation that he has no arms, 
" A herald, Kate? Oh ! put me in thy books." So also, in 
Much Ado About Nothing (act i. scene 1), the messenger 



108 SHAKSPEKE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

says to Beatrice, " I see the gentleman is not in your good 
books;" to which she replies, "No, an he were, I would 
burn my study." The phrase, no doubt, had its origin in 
servants and retainers being entered in their employers' 
books, and still in Warwickshire continues in its primitive 
sense. 

To go on to other matters. Nothing seems to have 
escaped Shakspere's eye, he drew his metaphors from all 
sources. The man breaking stones in some Warwick- 
shire by-lane would probably be able to throw some light 
on this passage from the Merchant of Venice (act v. 
scene 1): — 

Why, this is like the mending of highways, 
In summer, when the ways are fair enough. 

He would tell you that in Warwickshire, on the cold, wet 
lias land, there are many roads which are scarcely passable 
in winter, and are called, to this day, " summer roads ; " and 
he would further add, in explanation of the passage, that 
the country practice of road repairing is to draw heaps of 
stone on the wayside in summer, which are only made 
use of in winter ; and he would further tell you the mean- 
ing of the Duke of Bourbon's speech, in King Henry V. 
(act iii. scene 5) : — 

I will sell my dukedom, 
J To buy a slobberly and a dirty farm: 



THE PROVINCIALISMS OF SHAKSPERE. 109 

and that " slobberly," or " slobbery," * is to this day applied 
to the wet, dirty, Warwickshire by-roads. The house- 
wife, too, at some old Warwickshire farm, with its moss- 
thatched roof, will tell you that the expression in the 
. Taming of the Shrew (act v. scene 1), "my cake is dough," 
or, as Grumio has it in the same play, " our cake is dough 
i on both sides," is a common country proverb, and may be 
heard any day ; f and that he who wrote, 

Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopp'd, 
Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is. 

was well acquainted with country usages ; — and she will 
show you the great oblong oven of former days, with its 
" stopless " or w ditless," that is, the lid with which it is 
stopped. But so it is with Shakspere, every trade and 
calling he seems intuitively to understand. ' As he himself 

* Used also in Northamptonshire. See Miss Baker's Glossary of North- 
amptonshire Words. It would, however, I feel certain, be quite unknown in 
this application in many counties ; for instance, on the eocene formations 
I of Hampshire or Middlesex. 

f How fond Shakspere was of common proverbs, the following instances 
will show: — " Good wine needs no bush," As You Like It, hi the Epilogue, 
" Good liquor will make a cat speak," The Tempest, act i. scene 2. " Dead 
as a door nail," Second Part of King Henry IV., act v. scene 3. Pistol 
pours them out one after the other: "Pitch and pay," "Trust no one," 
"Hold-fast is the only dog," King Henry V., act ii. scene 3. So, too, 
in the Comedy of Errors, act iii. scene 1, we find " as mad as a buck ; " 
and in Much Ado About Nothing, act ii. scene 1, " God sends a curst cow 
short horns." 



110 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

says, " Every lane's end, every shop, church session, 
hanging, yields a careful man work." His mind readily 
apprenticed itself to whatever he saw. Allusions to a 
thousand occupations abound throughout his plays. For 
instance, take the following : te A wit of cheverill that 
stretches from an inch narrow to an ell broad." " A fish 
hangs in the net like a poor man's right in the law ; 'twill 
hardly come out." " A plague of opinion ! a man may 
wear it on both sides, like a leather jerkin." et Ignorance 
is a plummet over me : " and the inference to be drawn is 
not that Shakspere was a glover, or fisherman, or car- 
penter, but that his mind comprehended everything that 
it saw. For, looking at Shakspere as a whole, we find in 
him every quality that is required in any station of life. 
As far as we can judge from his writings, he had the 
requisites that would make a good general, a farmer, a 
merchant, or a naturalist — in fact, have given him pre- 
eminence in any calling. It is this manysidedness of his 
that has caused all the absurd books to be written proving 
that he must have been a lawyer, because he knew law so 
well ; or a doctor, because he so accurately describes the 
phases of certain diseases. The writers might just as well 
have argued, that because Shakspere has so faithfully 
described madness, that he must have been a lunatic. But 
a great poet, in fact, possesses all the faculties of the rest 



THE PROVINCIALISMS OF SHAKSPERE. Ill 

of the world. Shakspere's contemporary, Greene, was 
quite right when, in his Groats Worth of Wit, he called 
him " an absolute Johannes Fac-totum." In anger, as well 
as in wine, truth is spoken. 

And now, after this digression, let us return to some 
more provincialisms. -There is a curious phrase about 
Stratford of " prick-eared," which I have heard nowhere 
else, and is now applied not so much to an abusive as to a 
pert and upstart person. Thus, Pistol to Corporal Nym in 
King Henry V. (act ii. scene 1): "Pish for thee, Iceland 
dog ; thou prick-eared cur of Iceland." The metaphor has 
most probably been borrowed from the stable rather than 
the kennel, and alludes to the sharp-pointed, upright ears 
which some horses are continually pricking up, and in 
reference to this % I have often heard the word used. 

To proceed, a common Warwickshire expression to 
denote great length of time, is to say, "I have been 
employed here, man and boy, so many years ; " so in the 
grave-digging scene in Hamlet, the sexton says of himself, 
"I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years." 
And in the same scene occurs another provincialism, 
" Make her grave straight," which Dr. Johnson imagined 
alluded to some particular shape, but simply means, make 
it quickly ; just as, in the same play, Polonius says, " He 
will come straight," that is, immediately. 



112 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

Again, a peculiar use of the verb " quoth " is noticeable 
among the lower orders in Warwickshire. It is universally 
applied to inanimate things : for instance, though the 
ploughshare could not speak, still the verb quoth would 
not be inapplicable to it. " Jerk, quoth the ploughshare," 
that is, the ploughshare went — to use a vulgarism — -jerk, 
So, precisely in this sense in Romeo and Juliet (act L 
scene 3), the old nurse says, " Shake, quoth the dove- 
,house," that is, the dovehouse went or began shaking. 
Again, there is a peculiar use of the personal pronoun in 
Warwickshire, which I cannot do better than illustrate 
from Shakspere himself. Thus, in Romeo and Juliet (act ii. 
scene 4), Mercutio says of Tybalt, " He rests me his minim 
rest ; " and Hotspur, in the First Part of King Henry IV. 
(act iii. scene 1), thus speaks : — # 

See how this river comes me, cranking in, 
And cuts me, from the best of all my land, 
A huge half-moon, a monstrous cantle out. 

The punctuation is my own. The ordinary readings have 
no comma after " me," in the first line, though they insert 
it after the " me " in the second. Mortimer immediately 
after uses the same phrase, though not so strongly marked. 
So also Falstaff says, in praise of good sherris-sack, in the 
Second Part of King Henry IV. (act iv. scene 3), 
" It ascends me into the brain, dries me there all the 



THE PROVINCIALISMS OF SHAKSPERE. 113 

foolish, and dull, and crudy vapours." So also again, 
in Troilus and Cressida (act i. scene 2), perhaps the 
strongest instance of all, Pandarus thus describes the 
love of Helen for Troilus : w She came, and puts me 
her white hand to his cloven chin." Such a phrase can 
hardly well be explained. Those who have been in the habit 
of mixing with the common people of Warwickshire will 
at once recognize it as quite familiar to their ears. 

The number of words used in Shakspere's plays now 
heard only in the Midland counties, and which can there 
be better explained than by any learned commentary, is, 
to say the least, curious. To confine ourselves to War- 
wickshire — there is the expressive compound "blood- 
boltered" in Macbeth (act iv. scene 1), which the critics 
have all thought meant simply blood-stained. Miss Baker, 
in her Glossary of Northamptonshire Words, first pointed 
out that "bolter" was peculiarly a Warwickshire word, 
signifying to clot, collect, or cake, as snow does in a 
horse's hoof, thus giving the phrase a far greater intensity 
of meaning. And Steevens, too, first noticed, that in the 
expression in the Winter's Tale (act iii. scene 3), " Is it a 
boy or a child?" — where, by the way, every actor tries to 
make a point, and the audience invariably laughs — that 
the word " child " is used, as is sometimes the case in the 
midland districts, as synonymous with girl ; which is plainly 

8 



114 SHAKSPEKE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

its meaning in this passage, although the speaker has used 
it just before in its more common sense of either a boy or 
a girl. 

Again, there is the word "gull," in Timon of Athens 

(act ii. scene 1), 

But I do fear, % 

When every feather sticks in his own wing, 
Lord Timon will be left a naked gull, 
Which flashes now a phoenix; 

which most of the critics have thought alluded to a sea- 
gull, whereas it means an unfledged nestling, which to this 
day is so called in Warwickshire. And this interpretation 
throws a light on a passage in the First Part of King 
"Henry IV. (act v. scene 1): — 

You used me so, 
As that ungentle gull, the cuckoo's bird, 
Useththe sparrow; — 

where some notes amusingly say that the word alludes 
to the voracity of the cuckoo. I may add that the War- 
wickshire farmers' wives even now call their young gos- 
lings gulls. 

There is also a very common Warwickshire phrase, 
"contain yourself" that is, restrain yourself; and so in 
Timon of Athens (act ii. sc. 2), Timon says to his creditor's 
servant, ' c Contain yourself, good friend ; " and so again, 
in Troilus and Cressida (act v. sc. 2), Ulysses says : — 



THE PROVINCIALISMS OF SHAKSPEKE. 115 

O contain yourself, 
Your passion draws ears hither. 

And in the Two Gentlemen of Verona (act iv. scene 4), we 
find Launce using the still rarer phrase of " keep your- 
self/' in the same sense to his dog Crab. 

I will not, though, dwell too long upon a subject which, 
however curious, is still of very secondary importance. For 
the benefit of those who take an interest in word-lore, I 
have ventured to give in an Appendix a short glossary of 
words used in Shakspere's plays which are still to be heard 
in Warwickshire. For it is, after all, touching to think 
that, amidst the change that is ever going on, the same 
phrases which Shakspere spoke are still spoken in his native 
county, and that the flowers are still called by the same 
names which he called them. 




— jxxey Stalks. 



8—2 




CHAPTER XIII. 



SHAKSPEEE. 



I should indeed be guilty of giving Hamlet without Hamlet, 
were I to omit a chapter upon Shakspere himself, for I will 
not pay so bad a compliment to the reader as to suppose 
that he is impelled by the mere love of vulgar sight-seeing 
to visit Stratford. And my aim here will be, what it 
has been throughout the book, to show Shakspere as a 



SHAKSPEEE. 117 

moralist, and to remove the impression of that common 
opinion about him, which is still so current, that he was a 
great irregular genius. And let no one take alarm at that 
word moralist, for by it I simply wish to indicate the 
comprehensive manner in which Shakspere ought to be 
treated. I am not going to prove that he belonged to any 
school or sect, but simply intend treating him as the 
Catholic priest of all humanity, believing with Milton that 
" the lofty grave tragedians are the teachers best of moral 
prudence." The word " moralist" includes everything 
concerning a man ; and no great work of art can help but 
be deeply moral, for the insight into the Beautiful is the 
insight into the Divine, and the artist, to see the Beautiful, 
must necessarily be imbued with reverence and religion. 
This is an old truth, too often in our days forgotten; 
Strabo affirmed it in a passage before quoted; ^ aperi) 
7roirjTOv ow^su/crai tij tov av9p<jJ7rov 9 kcu ovk oiovTB 
ayaOov yeveaOai Troir)Tr\Vy jjlti irporepov yevr^OevTa avSpa 
ayaOov. And Milton said the same, when he declared 
that the writer of a poem must himself be a perfect 
poem. 

But in the case of Shakspere we are too likely to over- 
look the point. His great command and power of language, 
his gorgeous colouring, and his imagery attract most 
readers to their superficial beauty, instead of directing 



118 SHAKSPEEE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

them to the inner unity of the piece. His plays are so 
composite, so filled with both variety of character and 
matter, that we are in danger of losing sight of the simple 
idea round which everything moves. Hence he has been 
accused of writing without plan, or moral purpose. Even 
Wordsworth says, — 

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue 
That Shakspere spake, the faith and morals hold 
Which Milton held. 

And the same vicious distinction is made, if not by our 
best, by our most popular critics. 

Another reason for this view is that Shakspere has no 
definite system, no special morality; he is too sound to 
bring into prominence any one article, or creed, at the 
expense of another. He is like Nature : the trees and 
the flowers in Nature silently blossom, and bloom alike in 
open places and wildest desert, and to the common mind they 
have no meaning. They say never a word, and yet are 
full of meaning. The world moves on, and in silence 
the seasons come and go, and leave no impression on 
the ordinary man ; yet who shall say they teach no 
lesson ? The gloom of the mountains, the brightness 
of the valleys, the sunshine clothing wold and wood, 
the sternness of winter, the joy of spring, are all full of 
meaning. 



SHAKSPERE. 119 

In speaking, therefore, of Shakspere as a moralist, I 
repeat that my wish is to include him under the widest 
possible term; for morality, as was before said, includes 
everything in a man. A man's intellect is nothing else 
but the vital force within him, speaking more or less dis- 
tinctly. His deeds, his words, his writings, his very 
expression of face are the outcome of that moral force. 
You cannot separate the moral from the intellectual man. 
Hence a man's writings contain the best history of his 
inner life, in fact, of himself; they cannot speak falsely of 
him. When I read these lines, — 

The floor of heaven 
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold ; 
There's not the smallest orb, which thou behold'st 
But in his motion like an angel sings, 
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim: 
Such harmony is in immortal souls ; 
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it, — 

I feel that Shakspere was a good man, because to the 
bad the secrets of Nature can never be revealed. The 
bad man cannot possibly report Nature's inner spirit, any 
more than a man born blind can, from his own know- 
ledge, describe a rainbow : let me repeat, as emphatically 
as I can, that a bad man can only see the outside of Nature, 
and that not in its own pure light, but coloured by his own 



120 • SHAKSPEEE AND HIS BIKTHPLACE. 

diseased vision. He can never sink any deep shafts into 
Nature, and extract the riches and the golden wealth of 
contentment, with which she rewards her true lovers and 
worshippers. Such a passage as that quoted above, settles 
the question of the general tenour of Shakspere's life. I 
can no more believe the common tradition about his being 
a loose liver, than I can Homer's blindness. I do not 
for one moment mean to say that Shakspere never fell into 
temptation. He was, as far as we can judge, a man above 
all others whose nature was so sensitively framed as to 
receive an impression from all objects, and on this account 
must have been above all others scourged with the penalties 
of our humanity. He most of all must have been stretched 
upon the rack of the senses. No doubt, like the poet-king 
of Israel he was often vanquished by the outer world, but 
only for a time ; and depend also upon this, that every time 
that he fell, by so much was the strength of his intellect 
weakened, and his sight grew dim, and his gift of language 
palsied. Hence, too, that other popular idea of his passing 
through the world without care or trouble, is equally foolish. 
A good life is the development of God within us, but 
developed only by one long series of battles and wrestlings 
against evil. When I read Hamlet, and Lear, and Othello, 
I wonder that writing them had not made Shakspere 
"lean," as Dante said of himself. And so they would, 



SHAKSPERE. 12 L 

had not Shakspere possessed that wondrous, gentle, loving 
spirit of a child, melting the cares that must have lain 
round his heart. 

And if I were asked to mention what one particular trait 
I found most conspicuous in Shakspere, I should answer, 
— not his imagination, not his power of language, great as 
these were, but this very Love. He seems to have loved each 
thing ; and this spirit of love bathes everything he touches 
in its joy and sunshine. I cannot separate the name of 
Shakspere from the idea of love. There is a proverb 
Mr. Carlyle is fond of quoting, that " love furthers know- 
ledge," and it is in Shakspere's case most true. Shakspere 
in reality sees both deeper and wider with the heart than 
the intellect, and ubi charitas ibi claritas, says a still older 
proverb. All his judgments of men and things are made 
with a reference to this charity of love ; he seems almost 
to solve the enigma of life by love. Love, it might almost 
be said, takes with him the place of duty ; his plays overflow 
with the spirit of kindness and gentleness ; his heroines — 
" Shakspere's women," as a poet has since called them — 
make life and love synonymous. His heroes, had they 
gone to battle, might all of them have carried on their 
shields the simple motto " Amo," borne by the good knight 
of old. And theirs and Shakspere's love is not ordinary 
love, but that love without which life and the world cannot 



122 SHAKSPEKE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

be understood^ without which, in fact, there is no know- 
ledge. 

And so, too, no difficulty exists in accounting for the pro- 
found bitterness with which Shakspere sometimes looks on 
life. It is but this love speaking in its earnestness. The 
most loving souls have in them, above all others, the capacity 
for scorn in its bitterest intensity. Plato notices that 
comedy and tragedy are more closely united than might 
$1 first sight be supposed, and are ever to be found in the 
same poet. So too the intensest love and the in- 
tensest bitterness may be found in the same soul. For 
that bitterness is but the converse of that love ; so, there- 
fore, we need not be surprised at finding the man w 7 ho can 
so lovingly draw his fellow-creatures in their common 
everyday pursuits of life, girding at " the fool multitude 
that choose by show," calling them "the many-headed 
beast," " who if they love they know not why, they hate 
for no better reason ; " because he, knowing so W T ell the 
preciousness of that love, which never swerves, knows 
also how miserably vile are those who have flung it away. 
Again, too, from this cause, the man who above all others 
prizes the sweets of love and friendship, the joys of child- 
hood, of fatherhood, of brotherly and sisterly affection, 
can, when these are all gone, find nothing to value, and 
must vent his scorn in the misanthropy of some Timon. 



SHAKSPERE. 123 

He believes, as Plato has well put it, in human virtue, in 
human love, in noble feelings, but by some sudden wrench 
his friends prove faithless, his ideal dream is broken, and 
he wakes up in a cold, barren world, and his love is soured 
into poison. So, too, will this very love, that so dotes upon 
the beauties of the plains and the woodlands, and the whole 
moving pageant of Nature, exclaim in the dark night of 
its terrible reaction of grief and bitterness of heart, " that 
this goodly frame, the earth, is a sterile promontory ; this 
most excellent canopy the air, this brave overhanging 
firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, 
appear no other than a foul pestilent congregation of 
vapours." But this is a mood which only lasts for a short 
time with Shakspere ; love again with him soon resumes 
its old sway, and colours all things with deepest joy and 
gladness. 

This love, too, singular though it may at first appear, 
gives Shakspere his peculiar humour. If, as Goethe has 
well remarked, nothing is so characteristic of a person 
as what each finds to be laughable, so, also, nothing is 
so characteristic of an author as the style of his wit 
and humour. Shakspere's humour differs very widely 
from that of the mere satirist, who too often does but 
little good to the reader, and always positive harm to 
himself. There is not only breadth, but depth, in the 



124 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

humour of Shakspere. His is not the laughter for mere 
laughter's sake. It is difficult to define anything, but 
more especially humour, which is rather than anything 
else a feeling of the heart, steeping everything in its own 
warm, mellow sunshine of love. This is the humour of 
Shakspere, a loving, sympathetic humour, drawing upon 
humanity itself for its themes, sometimes indeed sad, but 
never tinged with any levity or heartlessness. Once 
or twice, perhaps, he may touch upon topics which are 
not fit subjects for mirth, but this arises from dramatic 
necessity, rather than from any other cause. Take, though, 
as a whole, all his humourists, and we shall find that they 
leave us merrier and wiser. There is Falstaff, who " can 
teach twenty men, but who cannot take one man's advice," 
whose death-bed scene is dwelt upon with a charity that 
should make us remember we are no fit judges of our 
brother's faults. There are all the clowns, too, from 
the clown in the Winter's Tale, who was "a gentleman 
born before his father," and to prove the fact, thought 
it incumbent to swear, up to Launce, whose very dog 
has more humour than most human beings. And then, 
rising from these up to such moralists as Touchstone, 
who takes for his text, " The fool doth think he is wise, 
but the wise man knows himself to be a fool ; " and the 
Jester in Lear, whose end of life is but " going to bed 



SHAKSPEEE. 125 

at noon/' we may through them better understand life 
itself. Shakspere's humour is essentially what Schiller 
would have called t€ Spieltrieb." Without it life can never 
be seen ; for humour looks upon life with a sort of earnest 
sport, its playfulness tinging its seriousness. It is not 
merely negative, as some have said, or else it would 
sink to mere wit; nor, like wit, does it deal with the 
fleeting, external affinities of things, but sees into their 
deeper relationships. Take, as an example, the Induction 
to the Taming of the Shrew, the centre of which is life 
viewed by a drunken clown ; or Gonzalo's model Utopia 
in the Tempest; or the nephelococcygia of Jack Cade 
in the Second Part of King Henry VI. ; or, better still, 
the grave-digging scene in Hamlet. In all of these, 
but especially in the last, we find, the deepest and sternest 
relations of life touched upon, and a new light thrown 
upon them. 

Let me now also notice what may appear slight 
and trivial to some, Shakspere's love for children and 
childhood. There is a healthiness and a joy about 
it which should not be passed over. I am not speak- 
ing now of the higher love which he always represents 
— a father feeling for his child, or a child for it£ 
parent, but that happy view of children and child's 
life that he paints. Take, for instance, how Polixenes, 



126 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

In the Winter's Tale (act i. scene 1), describes his boy, 

as:— 

All my exercise, my mirth, my matter, 
Now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy: 
My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all: 
He makes a July's day, short as December. 

Qr, again, look at the scene in the next act between 
Mamillius and his mother, where the little rogue tries 
,to frighten her by beginning so solemnly, "There was 
a man dwelt by a churchyard." This joyful way in 
which Shakspere touches upon children is very beautiful. 
For one more illustration, take Valeria's description, in 
Coriolanus (act i. scene 3), of Virgilia's boy, who " ran 
after a gilded butterfly, and when he caught it, he let 
it go again; and after it again; and over and over he 
comes, and up again, and caught it again : " a picture 
which is very natural. I make no apology for dwelling 
upon this subject, so likely from its apparent triviality 
to be overlooked, but none the less important, as showing 
Shakspere's healthy tone of mind. 

Nor let us forget the higher love which Shakspere ever 
draws of a father feeling for his son, or a child for its 
parents. In the speech of Ulysses, in Troilus and Cres- 
sida (act i. scene 3), the height of civil discord is marked 
by a son striking his father. The most touching scene 



SHAKSPERE. 127 

in Coriolanus is where the Roman general, well knowing 
that he shall have to pay the price of death for his 
affection, yet ungrudgingly gives his love to his mother. 
She conquers when all Rome failed. In King Lear filial 
love is the organic centre round which all turns. So, 
also, in the abstract, is old age venerable, loveable, in 
Shakspere's eyes. The greatest fault that Ulysses can 
find in Achilles is that he should laugh at Nestor, and 
that €€ the faint defects of age " should be turned into 
ridicule. All this is very beautiful, showing how thoroughly 
Shakspere felt life to be sublime. 

Again, too, the proverb, "love furthers knowledge,' 9 
holds good in his descriptions of natural scenery. I have 
in a previous chapter spoken of this love for nature, but 
I cannot possibly dwell too much upon it in these days 
of overgrown towns, and smoke, and din, and factories. 
As was before said, this true love for nature, almost 
rising into an affection as for a personal human being, 
makes him know her so well, and describe her so accu- 
rately. We find it even in his very earliest pieces. 
Take, for instance, that description in the Venus and 
Adonis — 

The stndded bridle on a ragged bough 
Nimbly she fastens: 

what beauty there is in that epithet " ragged " — that 



128 SHAKSPEKE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

is, ragged with bits and fragments of gray moss. Take 
another picture, in As You Like It (act iv. scene 3), of 
a similar scene : — 

An oak, whose boughs were mossed with age, 
And high top bald with dry antiquity. 

Shakspere paints his pictures as accurately as nature does, 
leaving nothing unfinished, no line hurried or blurred ; 
feeling that, above all, "truth is truest poesy." For in- 
stance, examine the following lines from Cymbeline (act iv. 
scene 2) : — 

With fairest flowers 
While summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele, 
I'll sweeten thy sad grave; thou shalt not lack 
The flower, that's like thy face, pale primrose; nor 
The azur'd harebell, like thy veins ; no, nor 
The leaf of eglantine, whom, not to slander, 
Outsweeten'd not thy breath: the ruddock would, 
With charitable bill (oh ! bill, sore shaming 
Those rich-left heirs, that let their fathers he 
Without a monument!), bring thee all this; 
Yea, and furr'd moss beside, when flowers are none, 
To winter-ground thy corse. 

Analyze the whole piece, mark first the mention of the 
primroses, because they come first, pale as Imogen's face, 
reminding us of the passage in the Winter's Tale — " pale 
primroses that die unmarried." And then, too, notice the 
harebell, that is, the hyacinth of spring, the common blue- 
bell, which we saw in such quantities in the woods round 



SHAKSPERE. 129 

Stratford, and which blooms somewhat later than the 

primrose, in whose blue he can see nothing less beautiful 

than Imogen's veins. And then mark, too, he mentions 

the leaf of the eglantine, that is, the sweet-briar — not its 

flower, which has not yet blossomed, but the leaf, which, 

when rubbed in the hands, is so very sweet. And lastly, 

too, notice that beautiful epithet " furred " applied to the 

moss, giving us its very texture. 

Even his love for colour does not lead Shakspere into 

mistakes: take the lines in Timon of Athens (act iv. 

scene 3) : — 

The black toad, and adder blue, 
And gilded newt. 

The toad is here black, because, by being spotted with 
black, and by its ugliness and its supposed evil qualities, 
it becomes to the imagination really black ; and the adder 
is blue, although only the under part is a dull blue ; but 
because by this we can most readily distinguish it from 
the common harmless snake, he calls it generally blue, 
although only one portion is so. And the newt is gilded, 
not only from its yellow colour, but because it is so fond 
of basking in the warm sunshine, which makes it seem 
golden. 

But Shakspere's love for nature does not stop here. 
He clearly sees that drawing nature accurately is not 

9 



130 SHAKSPEKE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

the only thing necessary— perhaps by itself is valueless, 
unless he can connect nature with life, and by her explain 
its mysteries. He therefore uses her forms as a language, 
and she becomes in his hands an interpreter between us 
and the invisible world. All her shapes and emblems 
are to him an alphabet by which he may read "the 
open secret" of the universe. Here lies the real dif- 
ference between the true poet and the impostor. For 
no man, except the pure in spirit, can have this insight, 
this divination into nature, for she also is pure, and all 
things can be but interpreted by the same spirit as that 
which they are. The base man can no more understand 
nature than a deaf man the music of Beethoven. He 
not only cannot now, but it is impossible for him ever 
to do »so, try how he may, as long as he is at all base. 
Shakspere, by his pure, deep love, pierced below the 
surface of things, and saw there the divine spirit of life. 
In this sense Novalis's saying about Shakspere is to be 
understood, that " his dramas are products of nature, as 
deep as nature herself." And this is wonderfully true, 
for the greatest man may be known by this sign, that 
he is most in unison with nature, that he allies his poetry 
with her own, and by her help explains the mysteries 
and wonders within our souls. Nature herself is the 
greatest poet, and the pure, reverent soul draws its 



SHAKSPERE. 131 

inspiration from her, receiving for its blessing and its 
precious reward, that it is more and more taken into her 
bosom. 

Of course I do not mean to say that love, in its usual 
sense, as well as in its higher meanings of charity and 
sympathy, is the only key to Shakspere's mind. Yet still I 
do think that it is the most conspicuous trait in his writings. 
This gives him that spirit of forbearance, the characteristic 
of every noble mind, which made him exclaim more 
than once, " Judge not, for we are sinners all." This 
makes him draw real men and women with human affec- 
tions and human sympathy, never scorning the poorest 
or the lowest. From his plays may be compiled a litany 
of precious thoughts, of which charity is the basis, teaching 
us how that ever "the rarer action is in virtue than in 
vengeance," that we should " cherish those hearts that 
hate us," and that we should let " gentleness our strong 
enforcement be." He sympathizes with everything, not 
only with man, but the poor beetle and the worm that 
we tread upon. And in his plays we are ever meeting 
with that spirit, which found its fullest expression in 
Wordsworth's lines — 

Never to blend our pleasure, or our pride, 
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels. 

More upon this subject of loving charity I shall have to 

9—2 



132 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

say when I mention Shakspere's religious opinions. Now 
let us turn to other characteristics. And first of all, of 
his patriotism, which is something more than the mere 
outcome of dramatic character. In his pages we find 
reflected all the spirit and chivalry of one of the noblest 
eras of English history. His patriotism literally burns 
in his lines. He seems to have had that same feeling: 
which made Homer say, " The one best omen is to fight 
for fatherland." His is not the mere vaporous rant of 
a charlatan, nor the adroitness of a party statesman trying 
to make political capital, but the true, deep love of the 
patriot, glorying in the nobleness and high-mindedness of 
his country, and feeling beyond all bitterly pained when 
she stoops to what is mean and base. This is the key- 
note to all his historical plays. He dearly loves that 
" sea-walled isle," that " pale, that white-faced shore," 
which in another place he so lovingly describes as — 

This precious stone set in a silver sea. 

It is this patriotism that makes him in King John ex- 
claim — 

Nought shall make us rue 

If England to herself do rest but true. 

In which lines, perhaps, are included all that a statesman 
need require to govern his country. It is certainly well 
worth reflecting how dearly Shakspere loved his country, 



SHAKSPERE. 133 

• 

in these days of ours, when there are men who would 
about as much dream of defending it as rabbits their 
burrows. Yet, on the other hand, has Shakspere, more 
eloquently than any Peace Society, painted the horrors of 
war in that one terrible cartoon of — 

Mars, at whose heels, 
Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire 
Crouch for employment ; 

and denounced as criminal the passion for war — war which 
Othello so bitterly says " makes ambition virtue." 

Let me now notice, for it is most important, how true 
an artist Shakspere was. No vicious incident, no strained 
effect at the cost of virtue, no unnatural situation, disfigure 
his pages, to catch any temporary applause. He gave no 
"sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth." Beaumont 
and Fletcher were, for reasons which eternally redound 
to Shakspere's credit, the favourites on the stage after 
his death. Truly great was he that he respected not 
the suffrages of the " groundlings." He cared not "to 
set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh." He 
minded not the applause of " the youths that thunder at a 
playhouse," nor of those who come merely to hear — 

A noise of targets, or to see a fellow 

In a long motley coat, guarded with yellow. 

These and such as these he tells us will be disappointed 



134 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

with him and his plays. He is evidently the true artist 
who loves his work, and will not allow it to be spoilt by 
one single word or letter, for the fleeting caprice of the 
moment. There was nothing about him of the spirit of 
Lope de Vega, who, to gain popularity, acknowledged that 
he pandered to the tastes of his audience and his age. 
Shakspere wrote, not as if clownish boys, but real Cordelias 
and Imogens performed their own parts on the stage. 
And it was this moral delicacy of taste — and taste, be it 
observed, is not an acquirement, but the outcome of a pure 
soul — that made him in King John humanize the spirit of 
the older drama, and in Hamlet refine the coarse features 
of the Ophelia of the original story, and in the Merchant of 
Venice fling away the dross, and keep only the gold of the 
old play. 

I have spoken of the joy that pervades Shakspere: still 
there is another side of his nature to be looked at ; and 
we cannot but feel the somewhat cold, stern view of life 
that he takes. This arises from his greatness; he is ever 
unmoved ; sunshine and shadow play alternately across his 
scenes, and we know not with which he sympathizes. Good 
and evil come and go, and he seems not to mind. His 
great nature takes all in, as the sea does alike the Amazons, 
or the mountain rill, or the filthy drain, purifying them 
all in its vast alembic. And in his later plays, too, a some- 



SHAKSPERE. 135 

what bitter tone of feeling is perhaps observable, as if 
when the sun of his life was setting, some dark clouds 
rose and gathered round it, not untinged, though, with 
light and hope. But we must remember that sorrow and 
even bitterness of soul are proportioned to a man's great- 
ness, and it is as true now as ever, that increase of know- 
ledge increaseth sorrow. Walpole said, " Life is a tragedy 
to those who feel, a comedy to those who think." It is a 
comedy to no one but the fool ; the lesson of life is like 
the lesson of history — though full of hope, still very 
sad ; and tragic poetry is the record of our deepest griefs, 
of the struggles of our better nature with the brute within 
us ; the tale of our free-will, according to our strength or 
our weaknesses, either proving itself victorious over, or 
yielding to, necessity; a tragedy itself which is enacted 
either successfully or not by every one who lives. 

Perhaps from his occasionally stern view of life has 
arisen the accusation that Shakspere does not make virtue 
triumphant. It is a pitiful charge, and whoso expects his 
good actions to be rewarded, deserves whatever ill may 
befall him. It is only a platitude to say that virtue is its 
own reward, and yet men never seem to realize its truth. 
What Shakspere teaches is what every high-minded man 
would teach, that rewards are the last things the good 
themselves expect 



136 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

Yet notwithstanding this view of life, as seen at times in 
the action and development of his plays ; notwithstanding, 
too, his many bitter outbursts against Fortune, Shakspere 
is constantly dwelling upon the power of man over circum- 
stances, and the triumph of man's free-will over necessity, 
" Give me the man who is not passion's slave," is the con- 
tinual cry of his soul, so unlike the creed of his brother 
dramatist, who held that "we ne'er are angels till our 
passions die." It is not the absence of passion, but its sub- 
jection, that gives man the ultimate victory. 

To thine ownself be true, 
And it must follow, as the night the day, 
Thou canst not then be false to any one, — 

is not the mere speaker's creed, but the doctrine that runs 
through the whole of Shakspere's plays. Whatever else 
may be said of Coriolanus as a whole, and doubtless there 
is much, yet one of the greatest lessons of that play is 
to show how a great man is self-subsistent ; his enemies 
cannot persecute him; banishment to him is impossible. "I 
banish you," says Coriolanus ; " not you, me. There is a 
world elsewhere," besides at Rome. You can rob me of 
hearth and fire, and some few yards of roof-shelter, but 
that is all. A man is not the creature of circumstances ; 
they in no ways affect him ; but he moulds them. The 
true man is, as the guards say of Menenius, " the oak 



SHAKSPEKE. 137 

not to be windsliaken ; " or, as Coriolanus better puts it, 
" extremity is the trier of spirits." Such seems to me at 
least one of the morals of the play. And the same lesson 
is taught throughout Shakspere, that external circumstances 
have no power over us, that we ourselves are our worst 
enemies, and that from within, and not from without, 
harm comes ; that worldly misfortunes cannot hurt us ; on 
the contrary, if we use them rightly, may do us much 
good. What if they do come ? " There is no time so miser- 
able but a man may be true." " It is the mind that makes 
the body rich," he is constantly saying. No man ever 
read to the world such fine lessons from Adversity, as 
Shakspere. He was the first who crowned her with a 
precious jewel on her head : before his time she had been 
sister to the Furies ; he made her a fourth Grace. 

And now for a few words upon Shakspere's religious 
views ; and here again his wide-world charity and love 
meet us. There is nothing sectarian about him; he is 
thoroughly catholic, shining like the sun on the good and 
the bad. " I'd beat him like a dog," exclaims Sir Andrew, 
in Twelfth Night " What, for being a Puritan ? " exclaims 
Sir Toby, with exquisite irony. From this cause is Shak- 
spere's Shylock so very different from the stage Jew of 
the time, " who was baited through five long acts." The 
most careless reader must perceive that the calamities which 



138 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

befall Shylock arise not because he is a Jew, but a bad 
man. The character too is not drawn for the mere charac- 
ter's sake ; most skilfully does Shakspere turn Shylock to 
good account, as a means whereby to attack the short- 
comings of Christians. In no other play, and by no other 
character, could this have been so well done. Through him 
Shakspere denounces slavery, then lately introduced by 
Sir John Hawkins into England ; through him, too, he 
exposed the intolerance of the times, which made Marlowe's 
Jew of Malta a popular play, and " the Jew himself, God 
bless the mark, a kind of devil." 

So again in this wide spirit that " one touch of Nature 
makes the whole world kin," does he draw Friar Laurence 
in Romeo and Juliet, at a time when Romanist priests were 
hung at Tyburn. And in the same spirit, when Leontes 
tells Paulina that she shall be burnt, he makes her 
reply, 

It is a heretic that makes the fire, 
Not she which bums in it ; 

and this too when Francis Kett was being burnt for 
heresy at Norwich. 

Let us notice too with what reverence Shakspere ever 
treats religion and religious subjects. Bacon has said, 
" admiratio est semen sapientiae." But reverence is wisdom 
itself, its beginning and its end. Against Puritanism only 



SHAKSPEKE. 139 

does Shakspere strike ; and yet, as we have above seen, 
there is no ill-nature in his blows. I yield to no one in 
my admiration of the Puritans, but there is a side of their 
character I cannot admire ; they left quite out of view the 
culture of men's aesthetic nature, which is not only neces- 
sary for a right existence, but with religion, of which too 
it forms a part, makes up life. The higher and more 
deeply cultivated Puritan, like Milton, well knew this. 
Of the average Puritan I now only speak, who thought 
that because he was virtuous there should be no more cakes 
and ale. And in looking at Shakspere's criticism of Puri- 
tanism, we must not forget the violent attacks the Puritans 
had already made even in his time against the stage. 

Let us notice also Shakspere's liberality in other things 
which were then looked upon as vitally mixed up with 
religion, such as his treatment of witches at a time when 
the King of England was writing a book upon the justice 
of punishing them, and when Acts of Parliament were 
passed, condemning to death any one concerned with so- 
called witchcraft. No faith had he either in the astrology 
of the day. He tells us, over and over again, that " men 
at some times are masters of their fates : the fault is not in 
our stars, but in ourselves." 

But it is because Shakspere reflected all that was noble 
and good in the religion of his age, that he will live for all 



140 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

ages. His Protestantism was not confined to a protest against 
popery, but against the popery of sectarianism and narrow- 
mindedness of any kind. And this matter of Protestantism 
is far too important to be settled in a sentence. The real 
question is, How far, and in what way, did Protestantism 
affect Shakspere? I think the answer is contained in the 
examples just given of his thoroughly catholic treatment 
of all religious creeds. The end and aim of Protestantism 
is to emancipate the subjectivity of the mind from any 
objective power, and this is what is accomplished by 
Shakspere. This makes the difference between him and 
all other writers ; the views of most authors are so entirely 
built upon some narrow creed of their own day, that they 
are fit only for readers of that creed, and their own day. 
But the true poet is for all time, and creeds, and people ; 
and for much of his largeness and liberality of view was 
Shakspere undoubtedly indebted to Protestantism, into 
whose noble inner meaning he had strength to see. 

And this question of Protestantism is so intimately 
mixed up with Shakspere's age, that we must look also at 
the age itself for a solution of Shakspere's principles. 
Schiller well says, " The artist is the son of his age ; but 
pity for him if he is its pupil. The matter of his works he 
will take from the present, but their form he will devise 
from a nobler time, nay, from beyond all time, from the 



SHAKSPERE. 141 

absolute unchanging unity of his own nature." And this 
is most true of Shakspere. The poet is ever the reflex of 
his age, giving back in his own mirror the idealized forms 
and thoughts of his time. Shakspere lived on the threshold 
of a new era. Behind him the sun of the middle ages was 
for ever setting, tinging everything with its bright colours, 
whilst before him was rising the clear white dawn of the 
modern spirit of inquiry. Learning and philosophical 
research had already arisen. The old current of the 
Reformation was flowing in a new direction, some day to 
flood the dry places of the earth, and with its waves to 
sweep away the English monarchy. 

This must be carefully borne in mind when inquiring 
into Shakspere's views of life. He did not live to see 
the effects of this new spirit of inquiry and free thought; 
but he must have, in some measure, when speculating, to 
quote his own expressive phrase, upon 

The prophetic soul 
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come, — 

have foreseen some of its issues. This fact, as Ulrici has 
shown, will reconcile so much that is else contradictory in 
his plays. There we find, in bare, naked contrast, the two 
spirits of his day — the old and the new view of the world 
and life, so opposite and so sharply marked ; on the one 
hand, the objectivity of the middle ages ; and on the other, 



142 SHAKSPEBE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

the definite consciousness and the modern spirit of freedom 
of discussion. 

From this latter arises in his plays a tendency to specu- 
lation. Hence does he preach the doctrine, that w igno- 
rance is God's curse," and that, above all things, " thought 
is free ; " or, as he puts it elsewhere — 

Truth can never be confirmed enough, 
Though doubts did ever sleep. 

Like all wise men, he leans trustfully on that beneficent 
Power, who sent us into the world. As we come here, so 
we must go. " Ripeness is all." And he sings of the 
grave, not as the prison-house of the body, but the bridal- 
chamber, where the soul will be mated with all that is 
purest and holiest. 

Hence, too, from this double view of life partly arise 
all the contradictions in his plays. I say, partly, because 
every great man, in proportion to his greatness, is full of 
contradictions. Plato and Shakspere especially are so. 
And they are so, because they, more than any one else, 
can see and feel the contradictions and the incompleteness 
of the world and life itself. 

But it is by contrasting Shakspere with the old Greek 
dramatist, that we can best see how far his views of life 
were affected by modern thought. With the old Greek, 
the black gloom of destiny enshrouded everything. The 



SHAKSPERE. 143 

cloud shows but a hand's breadth in size at the beginning 
of the play, but keeps gradually darkening and darkening 
until it bursts with all its lurid gloom and fury. With 
Shakspere, man, if he can find out the right way, is at 
least the arbiter of his own fate. The end and aim of man, 
with Shakspere, is to reconcile the free-will of his own 
mind with moral necessity ; and when man cannot do this, 
when he fails, through weakness or pride, or stubbornness 
of heart, then comes the true tragedy of life, miserable, 
heart-rending. 

The following may better explain Shakspere's theory of 
free-will and destiny: — A blind girl used to read the 
raised type of her Bible by her fingers. Through an ill- 
ness, her power of touch lost its sensitiveness, and day by 
day she felt it leaving her, until she lost it altogether. 
She could no longer read her Book of Life. She was cut 
off from all light. In her agony of despair, she took up 
her book, as she imagined, for the last time, and kissed it ; 
and, to her surprise and deep joy, the power which had 
been taken away from her fingers she found still remained, 
with trebled sensitiveness, on her lips. Once more she 
could read. This, with Shakspere, is the case with man. 
Man is blindly groping about the world, feeling his way. 
By-and-by, he entirely loses the faint clue he once had. 
And not until he reconciles himself with fate — as it were, 



144 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

kisses necessity — is he able to read and understand the 
Book of Life. 

All this is, after all, a poor, barren, meagre account of 
Shakspere. We can no more judge of a man by a few 
quotations from his works, than of the infinite grandeur of 
the sea by a few buckets-full of water brought up as a 
specimen. I should have liked to have analyzed a play 
or two, and shown how the views that I have stated are 
borne out. But this chapter has already exceeded the 
limits originally intended. 

Of Shakspere's personal life, as we have already seen, 
it is a series of conjectures. All that is known of him in 
connection with Stratford has been related in previous 
chapters. The little information we possess from other 
sources is most valuable, especially the documents dis- 
covered by Mr. Collier amongst the papers at Bridgewater 
House, with the signature of " H. S.," supposed to stand 
for Henry, Earl of Southampton, addressed to the Chan- 
cellor Ellesmere, on behalf of Burbage and Shakspere, 
whose theatre was "threatened," to quote the expression 
in the letter, by the Lord Mayor and the Aldermen of 
London. The latter portion of it thus runs ; " . . . their 
trust and suit now is, not to be molested in their way of 
life, whereby they maintain themselves, and their wives 



SHAKSPERE. ' 145 

and families (both being married, and of good reputation), 
as well as the widows and orphans of some of their dead 
fellows." This care for the orphans and widows of their 
friends is, indeed, touching and beautiful, and in accord- 
ance with all we know of Shakspere's character.* 

The few allusions in his plays to his personal friends 
bear the same testimony to his goodness and gentleness of 
heart Such is that in As You Like It (act iii. scene 5), to 
his poor friend Marlowe, as " the dead shepherd ; " but 
still finer, in the Midsummer NigMs Dream, that to Greene, 
in the lines, — 

The thrice three Muses mourning for the death 
Of Learning, late deceased. 

Such is the epitaph he writes over the man who with his 
dying breath abused him. I know no other such example 
of truest Christian charity in all literature. 

His sonnets bear the same testimony. I ,am amongst 
those who, with Schlegel, regard them as autobiogra- 
phical. There is, doubtless, much that is dramatic in 
them, for Shakspere's genius was essentially dramatic. But 
allowing this its full weight, we see in them the true man 
revealing himself. They tell us the tale, whioh every one 
to a certain extent has felt, of friendship and love won and 

* It is but right to say that there have been doubts thrown on this letter. 
But the best critics, including Mr. Halliwell, maintain its genuineness. 

10 



146 SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 

lost — somewhat, perhaps, hyperbolically expressed, but 
still, in the main, true. They tell us, too, the dark conflict 
of passion and perplexity, which we all, according to our 
natures, suffer ; they show us, also, that profoundly melan- 
choly side of the highest intellects, prone to brood on 
misery, which at times, from the depths of a bitter expe- 
rience, so loves to paint not only its own griefs, but " dark, 
ideal hues ; " but, above all, do they tell us the man's 
strong, passionate love, conquering everything else. 
"Love is my sin," he cries, in Sonnet CXLII. ; and so all 
through them we find the outpourings of a spirit of love 
and friendship. 

I know it is often said that critics discover in Shakspere's 
writings hidden beauties which Shakspere himself knew 
not ; but this is far truer, that every great poet intuitively 
seizes upon truths, and writes them without being con- 
scious. The great man is always greater than he knows : 
and at first sight, as has been said before, Shakspere 
appears to be entirely without purpose, as if he were ap- 
pointed to simply transcribe what he saw without comment 
or bias of his own. The deepest moral, though, is never 
written in iarger print : what is obvious is generally not 
worth much : and as with Nature so with Shakspere : the 
problems of life we are left to solve ; and Shakspere's 
characters must speak to us themselves, or not at all. 



SHAKSPEKE. 147 

And the highest power any writer can evince, is that 
without comment or remark, he is able to draw his 
characters so that the reader may love the good, and loathe 
the bad. And this depends upon no wire -drawn moral, or 
objective incident, or making virtue triumphant, but simply, 
as has been said long ago, upon the r?0oc tov Aeyovroe, the 
true reverential spirit, which bows itself before the mys- 
teries of life, and impresses itself upon everything it 
touches, and which so thoroughly imbues Shakspere's 
nature. Compared with this all else is secondary, value- 
less. 

Here I must at length stop. Briefly, let me say of 
Shakspere, that in him are united the excellences of all 
other poets that ever lived. He combines the sweetness 
and the lyrical power of Beaumont and Fletcher, with the 
wit of Jonson, and the grandeur of Milton, and the 
chivalry of Spenser— just as it was said that the beauty of 
all other women was to be found in Helen of Argos. And 
the greatest praise which can be given Shakspere, is to say 
that he is not a person, but a name. These great world- 
poets, Homer and Shakspere, fit all nations and all times. 
Shakspere is careless of his works, because he knows they 
are not his, but Some One's superior to him. In the 
strength of his genius, he abandons all claim to it. It is 
mine, 'tis yours, reader, as much as Shakspere's. This 

10—2 



148 



SHAKSPERE AND HIS BIRTHPLACE. 



indifference to the authorship of his works proves how 
really great he was. 

Well has it been said, that poets are the true priests 
and kings of the earth; and it was no mere rhapsody that 
made Jean PaulRichter call Shakspere the " poetic Christ- 
child. " In conclusion, let us remember how quietly he 
lived and died, known to his friends and companions by 
that one epithet, " gentle," and then contrast him with all 
the noisy, self-seeking Kaisers and Napoleons who have 
harried the world with misery and desolation. The thunder 
and the lightning attract all men's ears and eyes, but the 
gentle rain and the calm sunshine alone profit the earth. 




Remains of Snakspere's House at New Place 



149 



A GLOSSAKY OF WOKDS 

STILL USED IN WARWICKSHIRE 

TO BE FOUND IN SHAKSPERE. 



As I before stated, I by no means wish to say that the following 
words are to be found nowhere but in Shakspere and Warwickshire. 
Some, though, undoubtedly are provincialisms. And we must re- 
member the fact, how very strongly different dialects are marked in 
England, and the wide difference there is, not only in the meaning, 
but in the pronunciation of the same words, in Dorsetshire, where 
the Saxon element is most marked, and in the eastern and midland 
counties, where the Anglian is more prominent. Thus, in the 
Venus and Adonis, Shakspere rhymes "juice " as if spelt "Joyce," a 
thoroughly midland pronunciation of the word: — 

Ill-natured, crooked, churlish, harsh iu voice, 
O'erwom, despised, rheumatic, and cold, 
Thick-sighted, barren, lean, and lacking juice. 

And again, in the very next stanza, as Dr. Farmer also remarked, 



150 GLOSSARY. 

" ear " is rhymed, as it is to this day pronounced in Warwickshire, as 
if it were " air : " — 

Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear, 

Or, like a fairy, trip upon the green, 
Or, like a nymph, with long, dishevell'd hair, 

Dance on the sands, and yet no footing seen. 

I shall venture, then, to give a list of what Shaksperian words I 
have chiefly noticed as still in use among the peasantry of Warwick- 
shire; premising only that the chief value is in the fact, that they are 
still spoken by breathing human beings, the same sort as from whose 
lips Shakspere learnt his mother tongue. 

Batlet. — Rightly explained in the glossaries as an instrument with which 
washers beat their coarse clothes. I have heard women speak of 
their " batlet-tub." Round Stratford the former is now more com- 
monly called "a dolly," or "a maiden." As You Like It, act ii. 
scene 4. 

Bavin. — There are several different definitions given of this word in the 
dictionaries; but in Warwickshire I have found it more generally 
to mean the scraps and scrapings of the faggot, in distinction to the 
faggot itself, and which so easily kindle, thus explaining the passage 
in the First Part of King Henry IV., act iii. scene 2, " rash bavin 
wits soon kindled and soon burnt." Used also by Lily, in Mother 
Bombie. 

Bottle. — "A bottle of hay," for which Bottom pines in the Midsummer 
Night's Dream, act iv. scene 1, is still a current phrase in Warwick- 
shire, and the midland counties generally. We meet with it every- 
where in common use in the proverb of " looking for a needle in a 
bottle of hay." 

Bow. — Still means a yoke for cattle. " As the ox hath his bow, sir ; so 
man hath his desires." — As You Like It, act iii. scene 4. 



GLOSSARY. 151 

Biggen. — A child's cap : rarely heard. 

Sleep 
Yet not so sound, and half so deeply sweet, 
As her whose brow, with homely biggen bound, 
Snores out the watch of night. 

Bravery. — Finery. Taming of the Shreio, act iv. scene 3. Co mm on 

among all Shakspere's contemporaries. 
Brize. — The gadfly. Pronounced "breeze," and sometimes "bree." Antony 

and Cleopatra, act iii. scene 8. Found also in Spenser. 
Broken Tears. — Still used of tears, which are suddenly stopped ; though 

in Troilus and Cressida, act iv. scene 4, they seem rather to mean 

tears broken by sobs. 
Childing. — Pregnant. Is very beautifully applied in the Midsummer 

Night's Dream, act ii. scene 2, to the autumn, which the common 

texts entirely spoil by reading " chilling." The same thought may 

be found expanded in the Sonnets, — 

The teeming autumn, big with rich increase, 

Bearing the wanton burden of the prime. Sonnet 97. 

Claw.— To flatter. " If a talent be a claw, look how he claws him with a 
talent." Love's Labour's Lost, act iv. scene 2. 

Cob-loaf. — " A badly set up loaf," to use one country expression to explain 
another, with a great deal of crust upon it. " Cob," by itself, in 
"Warwickshire, as in Oxfordshire, means a cake. And in the former 
county we meet with " warden-cobs," cakes in which warden pears 
are baked. In Troilus and Cressida, act ii. scene 1, Ajax calls 
Thersites " cob-loaf," and the allusion is to his ill-shaped head ; and 
in act v. scene 1, the metaphor is still carried out and explained by 
his being called a " crusty batch." 

Commit. — To commit adultery. So Othello to Desdemona : " What com- 
mitted, O thou public commoner ! " — Othello, act iv. scene 2. 

Customer. — A common woman. Otkello, act iv. scene 1 ; Comedy of 
Errors, act iv. scene 4. 

Dout. — A corruption of" do out : " very commonly used of putting out the 
candle, the extinguisher of which, as Miss Baker observes, in her 
Glossary of Northamptonshire Words, is called a " douter." To be 



152 GLOSS AEY. 

heard also in the southern counties. Metaphorically used in Hamlet, 

act iv. scene 7. 
Dup. — Formed, like the former word, from "do up." "Dup the door," 

or, more commonly, " sneck the door," may still be heard. Hamlet, 

act iv. scene 5. 
Doxy. — As Beaumont and Fletcher say in the Beggar's Bush, " neither 

wives, maids, nor widows." Still heard, though rarely. The Winter's 

Tale, act iv. scene 2. 
Eanlings. — Young lambs just eaned, or "dropped." The Merchant of 

Venice, act i. scene 3. In Lycidas, Milton speaks of the " weanling 

herds," which means, though, the lambs that have been weaned from 

their dams. 
Feeders. — Idle, good-for-nothing servants. Timon of Athens, act ii. scene 2. 

In Antony and Cleopatra, act iii. scene 11, we find them called 

" eaters," just as we now say of horses standing idle in the stable, 

that they are eating their heads off ; or as Massinger, in A New 

Way to Pay Old Debts, act i. scene 3, says of them, — 

bom 

Only to consume meat and drink, and fatten. 

For wearied. — Very tired. King John, act ii. scene 1. 

Fardel. — A faggot, or "kid," as it is more commonly called. Meta- 
phorically used in the well-known passage in Hamlet, act iii. scene 1. 
Termed in the more southern counties a " niche." 

Gib-cat. — " I am as melancholy as a gib-cat," says FalstafT, in the First 
Part of King Henry IV., act i. scene 2, and the proverb may not 
only be heard in Northamptonshire, as Miss Baker in her Glossary 
remarks, but also in Warwickshire. In our old writers a gib-cat 
seems to have meant a tom-cat, and the phrase probably arose because, 
as Linnaeus observes of the animal, misere amat. 

Honey-stalks. — White clover, so called because it is so full of honey. So, 
in Titus Andronicus, act iv.^cene 4, we find, — 

With words more sweet, and yet more dangerous 
Than baits to fish, or honey-stalks to sheep ; 
When as the one is wounded with the bait, 
The other rotted with delicious feed: 



GLOSSAKY. 153 

lines which every farmer knows to be true. I may perhaps here 
notice that Titus Andronicus contains a great number of provincial 
words; such as the next on the list "jet," to strut ; "shive," a slice; 
" urchin," a hedgehog, &c. ; which together with other internal evi- 
dence of style and language, would form a strong argument for its 
genuineness. 

Jet. — To walk, or rather strut, proudly, " like a crow in a gutter," as 
the common Warwickshire saying that accompanies it runs. Shak- 
spere, however, in connection with this word in Twelfth Night, act ii. 
scene 5, uses another bird with reference to Malvolio : " Contem- 
plation makes a rare turkey-cock of him ; how he jets under his 
advanced plumes." 

Inkles. — A sort of common tape ; the poorest and cheapest kind being 
called "beggar's inkle." The phrase which Miss Baker quotes in 
her Northamptonshire Glossary : " as thick as inkle weavers," may 
also be heard in Warwickshire, and without the word " inkle" even in 
the southern and western counties. Winter's Tale, act iv. scene 3. 

Irk. — To make uneasy. Still used impersonally: "it irks," exactly equi- 
valent to the Latin icedet. As You Like It, act ii. scene 3. 

Keck or Kex. — Used in Warwickshire and the midland counties, generally 
of the various species of umbelliferous plants which grow in the 
ditches and hedges : — 

nothing teems 
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kexes, burs. 

Henry V., act v. scene 2. 

Tennyson uses this word in The Princess, — 

though the rough kex break 
The starred mosaic. 
Kindle. — Said of animals bringing forth their young, more especially in 
reference to rabbits, as Bosalind uses it in As You Like It, act iii. 
scene 2. "A kindle" is sometimes used of a litter; as "trip" is 
in the south-western counties. 
Lief. — Soon. " I had as lief do so and so," may be heard every day in 
Warwickshire. See Mr. Craik's English of Shakspere, p. 38, 
and Miss Baker's Northamptonshire Glossary, on this word, 



154 GLOSS AKY. 

which is current more or less throughout all the midland districts, 
and which I perceive is in vogue with some modern writers, but 
which is, of course, now a mere vulgarism. How frequently Shakspere 
uses it, a reference to the concordance will show. Mr. Tennyson's 
use of this word and its comparative " liever " in the Idylls of the 
King is very beautiful. 
Lated. — benighted, belated. 

The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day, 

Now spurs the lated traveller. — Macbeth, act iii. scene 3. 

Lifter. — A thief. Hence, as Nares remarks, our modern phrase of " shop- 
lifter." Troilus and Cressida, act i. scene 2. Used also by Shak- 
spere's contemporaries. 

Lodge. — Still spoken of corn or any cereal, or even grass, being " laid," as 
the more common phrase is, by wind or rain. Thus, in Macbeth, 
act iv. scene 1, we find " though bladed corn be lodged." In Mr. 
Tennyson's Idylls of the King, we meet with the more usual ex- 
pression, — 

It fell 

Like flaws in summer laying lusty corn. Enid. 

Loggats. — An old English game played in various parts of England as 
late as in Steevens's time. The word now, though, in Warwickshire 
signifies a small piece of wood, and with " logger," is . sometimes 
used of the log or clog tied to an animal's legs to prevent its running 
away. Hamlet, act v. scene 1. 

Loon. — A stupid scamp. Macbeth, act v. scene 3. In Othello, act ii. 

scene 3, for the sake of the rhyme, we find a lown." And so written in 

Pericles, act iv. scene 4. 

Mammet. — A doll, puppet. 

This is no world 

To play with mammets. 

The First Part of King Henry IV., act ii. scene 3. 

It is now, though, only used by crow-boys of their scarecrows or 
" malkins," which latter word is used in Pericles, act iv. scene 4. 
Master. — Still used as a sort of prefix, by the lower orders, before a 
person's name. The same old use of the words may be found in 



GLOSSAEY. 155 

other parts of England, but never so commonly, I think, as in 
Warwickshire, where "good Master Fenton," and "good Master 
Brook," would still be so called, if they were now alive. 

Mortal. — In As You Like It, act ii. scene 4, we find, " so is all nature in 
love, mortal in folly : " that is, to use the common country expression, 
mortally foolish, or very foolish. The late Mr. Singer, in his edition 
of Shakspere, compares it with the expression, to be heard in 
Warwickshire and the midland districts, of " mortal tall/' mortal 
little." 

Nine Men's Morris. — The nine men's morris board, instead of being on 
the turf, is now more frequently cut on the corn-bins of the stables 
at the Warwickshire farm-houses, and the ploughmen use white and 
black beans to distinguish their men ; the great object being to get 
three of them in a row, or, as it is called, to have a " click-clack and 
an open row." In order to do this, you are allowed to take up your 
adversary's pieces as at draughts, or else to hem them up till they 
cannot move. There is also a game called " three men's morris," 
which is much simpler. 

Noul. — A head. In the Midsummer JVighfs Dream, act iii. scene 2, Puck 
talks about " the ass's noul " he has fixed on Bottom's head. And 
the word is still so used, both of animals and men, but always 
implying stupidity. 

Pash. —A rough head. " Thou wantest a rough pash," says Leontes to his 
little son, in the Winter's Tale, act i. scene 2. I have sometimes 
heard the compound expression, " a pash-head," used. 

Patch. — A fool, simpleton. "A crew of patches," The Midsummer 
JYighfs Dream, act iii. scene 2. Bottom, in his zeal, becomes tauto- 
logical, when he says, in the same play, act iv. scene 1, "Man is but 
a patched fool." And the adjective " patched " still means foolish. 

Pickthanels. — Tale-bearers. The First Part of King Henri/ IV., act iii. 
scene 2. During the rejoicings at Stratford on the conclusion of 
the Crimean war, I heard a peasant, saying of the public tea-meeting, 
&c, held in the High Street, "There will be pickthanking work 
to-morrow ; " that is, tale-bearing, gossiping, not unmixed with 
grumbling. 



156 GLOSSARY. 

Pun. — To pound. Troilus and Cressida, act ii. scene 1. Warwickshire 
country people nearly always speak of "punning fat." Nares appo- 
sitely quotes Dr. Johnson as an authority for the use of the word 
in the midland counties. 

Quat. — A small pimple, pustule, boil. Metaphorically used in Othello, 
act v. scene 1. Used also in the southern counties. 

Race. — " A race of ginger," that is, a stick of ginger. The Winter's Tale, 
act iv. scene 2. 

Ravin. — To devour voraciously. Measure for Measure, act i. scene 3. 

Rid. — To destroy. "The red plague rid, you," The Tempest, act i. 
scene 2. 

Sagg. — To tire, to sink down. A Warwickshire labourer will still speak 
of being "sagged," and of a "sagging job," that is, a tiring, 
fatiguing job. Applied metaphorically in Macbeth, act v. scene 3. 
Miss Baker very well explains this word in her Glossary of North- 
amptonshire Words. 

Salt. — In Antony and Cleopatra, act ii. scene 1, we meet with the singular 
expression of " salt Cleopatra," a phrase which none of the com- 
mentators have ventured to explain. It is still used of common 
women. 

Shive. — A slice. We still hear of " cutting a shive ;" and the proverb in 
Titus Andronicus, act ii. scene 1, "It is easy to steal a shive of a cut 
loaf," is still common in the midland and northern counties. 

Shog. — To jog off, make off. So Nym, in Henry V., act ii. scene 3, says, 
"Shall we shog off?" 

Shovel-board. — The Merry Wives of Windsor, act i. scene 1. A portion 
of the table in some of the Warwickshire public-houses is still marked 
out as the shovel-board, upon which a coin is jerked with the open 
hand to a given mark, the winner being the person who jerks it the 
nearest. A tradition exists in Stratford that Shakspere used to play 
shovel-board at the Falcon. 
Squash. — An unripe pea-pod. So Leontes, in the Winter's Tale, act L 
scene 2, calls his son "this kernel, this squash; " and Bully Bottom, 
in the Midsummer Night's Dream, act iii, scene 1, christens Fairy 
Peablossom's mother " Mistress Squash." 



GLOSSARY. 157 

Statute-caps. — Woollen caps, compelled to be worn by an Act in 1571, 
for the encouragement of the woollen trade. The name still lingers 
in some parts of the county, though not applied to woollen caps in 
particular. Love's Labour's Lost, act v. scene 2. 
Tills. — The shafts of a waggon. " An you draw backward, we'll put you 
i' the tills." Troilus and Cressida, act iii. scene 2. And in the 
Merchant of Venice we meet with "Dobbin, the phill-horse; " a 
phrase which may be still heard. 
Urchin. — A hedgehog. In the Venus and Adonis Shakspere calls the 
boar " urchin snouted," that is, with a nose like a hedgehog. The 
common notes on the passage say, " urchin, that is, a sea-porcupine." 
But the word is the common term in Warwickshire and the midland 
districts for a hedgehog, which is so called in old works on natural 
history. Titus Andronicus, act ii. scene 3. 
Wench. — A young maid. Still used in its primitiye sense as a term of 
endearment throughout the midland districts, as we find it in the old 
version of the Scriptures. " A chap and his wench," merely signifies 
a young fellow and his sweetheart. So Petruchio, in the Taming of 
the Shrew, act v. scene 2, when all has been made pleasant, says, 
" Why there's a wench, come on and kiss me, Kate." Every one 
will remember how Oliver Cromwell pathetically speaks of his 
children as "my two little wenches," Carlyle's Life of Cromwell, 
Supplement, p. 143. 
Whip-stock. — A carter's whip-handle. "Malvolio's nose is no whip- 
stock," Twelfth Night, act ii. scene 3.* 

* Since this Glossary was made, I have read Clerical Scenes, and 
Adam Bede, and the Mill on the Floss, written by one who knows 
Warwickshire well, and I could not help being struck with many of the 
provincialisms of the different characters ; how, for instance, in Janet's 
Repentance, p. 75, Mrs. Lowme is described by Mrs. Phipps as "yellow as 
any crow-flower ; " and how again, in the Mill on the Floss, vol. ii. p. 278, we 
find the same expression; how, too, in Adam Bede, vol. i. p. 79, Joshua 
Rann, the parish clerk, says, he has lived in the village " man and boy 
sixty years come St. Thomas ; " how, also, in Mr. Gilfil's Love Story, 



158 GLOSSAKY. 

Mr. Bellamy speaks of Sir Christopher, as " a gentleman born ; " how, in the 
Mill on the Floss, Mr. Tulliver affectingly calls Maggie " his little wench," 
and how we find the words " lief," and " master " constantly used. 

All these are Warwickshire expressions, and, as we have seen, used by 
Shakspere; and it is striking, after the lapse of nearly three hundred years, 
to find them once more reproduced in literature. 

One word more: I feel certain that many obscure passages, both in Shak- 
spere and all our Elizabethan dramatists, might be cleared up, if a more 
constant reference were made to our provincialisms. 

Cadent 
in honore vocabula : 

And a word, which two or three centuries ago was perfectly intelligible and 
in current use, is now quite obsolete, except as a provincialism, spoken only 
here and there by uneducated country people. 




0?£v 



^^H/i 




Autograph.. 



INDEX. 



AWs Well that Ends Well, 95. 
Alveston, village of, 46 ; pastures, 

46. 
Andronicus, Titus, 153, 157. 
Angelo, Michael, 49. 
Apple- John, mentioned by Shak- 

spere, 97, 98. 
Aquilegia vulgaris, 60. 
Arden, forest of, in Warwickshire, 

53, 54. 
Ardens, family of; the name of Shak- 

spere's mother, 64. 
As You Like It, 54, 94, 109, 128, 

145, 150, 153, 155. 
Ashbies, farm of, near "Wimpcote, 

belonged to Shakspere's father, 

38, 68. 

Astrology, in Shakspere's day, 139. 
Athens, Timon of, 114, 129, 152. 
Aubrey, his account of Shakspere, 

39, 77. 

Autolycus, song of, 101 (footnote), 

106. 
Avon, the, 21, 45, 75. 

Baker, Miss, 60, 109, 113, 151, 152, 

153. 
Batlet, meaning of, 1 50. 
Barson, village of, mentioned by 

Shakspere, 79. 
Beaumont, 133, 146. 
Bede, Adam, 157. 
Bell, Mr. Robert, 60. 
Bidford, 74, 89. 
Biggen, a, 151. 
Binton Hill, 68, 91. 



Biographies, the worthlessness of 

most, 3. 
Bishopton, 59, 98. 
Bitter-sweet, the, mentioned in 

Romeo and Juliet, 97. 
Boltered, blood-, meaning of, in 

Macbeth, 113. 
Bombie, Mother, 150. 
Boscobel Tracts, the, 89 (footnote). 
Bottle, a, in Shakspere, 150. 
Bow, meaning of, 150. 
Brake, the weir, near Stratford, 80. 
Bravery, still used for finery in 

Warwickshire, 151. 
Bredon Hill, 68. 
Brize, the meaning of, 151. 
Broken tears, meaning of, 151. 
Broom, "beggarly," 90. 
Burton Heath, village of, mentioned 

in the Taming of the Shrew, 79. 
Bush, the Beggar's, 152. 
Bushes, the Snitterfield, 64. 



Cade, Jack, 125. 

Caps, Statute, 157. 

Carlyle, Mr., 121. 

Cat, Gib-, 152. 

Chamberlain's accounts of Strat- 
ford, 17 (footnote), 35, 36. 

Chancel of Stratford Parish Church, 
26. 

Chapel of the Guild at Stratford, 1 7 ; 
used as a schoolroom, 29, 30. 

Charlecote Park, 43. 

Charles H., King, 67, 88. 



1 



160 



INDEX. 



Childhood, how connected with 
poetry, 6 ; Shakspere's love of, 
125. 

Childing, the meaning of, in the 
Midsummer Nigh? s Dream, 151. 

Church, Luddington, 82 ; Stratford 
Parish, 20 ; Weston, 82. 

Cider, Philips' poem of, 98. 

Claw, meaning of, 151. 

Cleeve, village of, 97. 

Clopton, Sir Hugh, 31 ; house, 63 ; 
lane, 16, 68. 

Coat, the leather-, 96. 

Cob-loaf, meaning of, 151. 

Cockain, Sir Aston, 78 ; poems of, 
76 {footnote). 

Coleridge, on the effects of scenery, 6. 

College of Stratford, 28. 

Collier, Mr., his researches, 4, 5, 
144 ; folio of, 76. 

Combe, John, 25. 

Comedy of Errors, 33, 151. 

Commit, meaning of, 151. 

Coriolanus, 37, 126, 137. 

Corporation books of Stratford, 38. 

Cottage, Anne Hathaway 's, 71. 

Cotsall Hills, the, 50, 78. 

Crab- John, 98 ; Shakspere's crab- 
tree, 86, 90 ; the Legend of, by 
C. F. Green, 91 {footnote). 

Cressida, Troilus and, 80, 113, 126, 
156. 

Crow-flowers, meaning of, in Shak- 
spere, 61, 157. 

Crow-toe, in Milton, 62. 

Culver-keys, meaning of, 63. 

Customer, meaning of, 151. 

Dante, 22, 49, 120. 

Daunce of Death, the, 30 {footnote). 

Davies, Kev. R., MS. of, 51 {foot- 
note). 

Deck, meaning of, in Warwickshire, 
105. 

Dill-cup, meaning of, 62. 

Dingles, the, near Stratford, 59. 

Dout, to, meaning of, 151. 

Doxy, meaning of, 152. 

Drayton, 5, 8 {footnote), 53. 



Dugdale, History of Warwickshire 

by, 31, 52 {footnote). 
Dup, to, meaning of, 152. 

Eanlings, meaning of, 152. 

Ear, pronounced air, by Shakspere, 
150. 

Eaters, meaning of, 152. 

Edgehill, battle of, 92. 

Eglantine, the sweet-briar of Shak- 
spere, 129. 

" Elm, one," the, at Stratford, 59, 68. 

Epigram on Mai one, 24 {footnote). 

Epitaph on Shakspere, 21 ; on 
Shakspere's daughter, Susannah 
Hall, 22 ; on John Combe, 26 
{footnote). 

Errors, Comedy of, 109, 151. 

Evesham, vale of, 90. 

Exhall, "dodging," 91. 

Eaiiy Queen, the, 22. 

Falcon Inn, the, at Stratford, 14, 18 
{footnote)-, at Bidford, 77 {foot- 
note), 89. 

Falstaff, 124. 

Fardel, meaning of, 152. 

Farm, the Cherry Orchard, 76 ; 
Hungry Arbour, 91. 

Feeders, meaning of, 152. 

Fingers, King's, in Hamlet, 61 {foot- 
note) ; dead men's, 61 {footnote). 

Fisher, Clement, of Wincot, 76. 

Flowers, their value, 10 ; names of, 
true poetry, 63 ; Shakspere's 
love of, 9, 10. 

Forwearied, meaning of, 152. 

Fulbrook Park, 52. 

Gastrel, Rev. Francis, 30. 

Gib-cat, meaning of, 152. 

Goethe, his account of himself, 22. 

Golding, on the word "rother," 
32 {footnote). 

Grace, herb of, 100. 

Grafton, "hungry," 91. 

Grammar School, the, of Stratford, 
17, 29. 

Great men, how they should be re- 
garded, 2. 



INDEX. 



161 



" Great House," the, at Stratford, 17. 
Groat's Worth of Wit, Greene's, 

111. 
Guild Hall, the, at Stratford, 17. 
Gull, meaning of, in Shakspere and 

Warwickshire, 114. 

Hall, the, of the Stratford Guild, 29. 

Hall, Dr., 22. 

Halliwell, accuracy of, 37 (footnote), 
145 (footnote) ; life of Shak- 
spere by, 15 (footnote) ; re- 
searches, of, 4, 5. 

Hamlet, 111, 134, 152, 154. 

Hare-hunting, described by Shaks- 
pere, 47, 48. 

Harvest-homes, Warwickshire, 99. 

Hathaway, Anne, 71. 

Hatton Rock, near Charlecote, 55. 

Henlev Street, 14, 16. 

Henry IV, First Part of, 97, 112, 
150, 152, 154, 155 ; Second 
Part of, 50, 76, 78, 79, 96, 107, 
109, 113. 

Henry V, 109, 111, 156. 

Henry VI, Second Part of, 125 ; 
Third Part of 105. 

Herb-o'-grace, 100. 

Hero-worship, its value, 5, 16. 

Herbert, Lord, of Cherbury, 10. 

Hill, Binton, 68, 91 ; Cross of the, 
75 ; Meon, 68 ; Rheon, 56. 

Hillborough, "haunted," 84, 90. 

Holditch, 83. 

Honey-stalks, meaning of, in Titus 
Andronicus, 152. 

Humour, definition of, 124. 

Huntington, Robert Earl of, 101 
(footnote). 

Icknield Street, 89. 

Idylls of the King, 154. 

Ingon Meadow Farm, 37, 64. 

Inkle, meaning of, 153. 

Irk, use of, in Warwickshire, 153. 

Jet, to, meaning of, 153. 
John-apple, mentioned by Shak- 
spere, 97. 



John, King, 132, 134. 

Johnson, Gerard, 24 ; Dr., on Shak- 
spere, 104, 112. 

Jonson, Ben, 2, 29. 

Juice, pronounced " Joyce " by 
Shakspere, 149. 

Juliet, Romeo and, 97, 112. 

Keck or Kex, 153. 

Ket, Francis, 138. 

Keys, culver, — meaning of, 63. 

Kindle, meaning of, 153. 

King, Idylls of the, 154. 

Bang's fingers, meaning of, 61 

(footnote). 
King's Lane, the, near Stratford, 67. 
Knight, Charles, 54, 74. 

Lane, Jane, 67. 

Lated, use of, in Warwickshire, 154. 

Lear, King, 124, 127. 

Leather-coat, the, mentioned by 
Shakspere, 96. 

Lief, use of, ^Warwickshire, 153,158. 

Life, troubles of, 11, 85. 

Lifter, meaning of, 154. 

Littleton, village of, 97. 

Lodge, to, meaning of, 154. 

Loggats, meaning of, 154. 

Long-purples, meaning of, in Hamlet, 
60, 105. 

Loon, meaning of, 154. 

Love's Labour's Lost, 62, 95. 

Love-in-idleness, still the Warwick- 
shire name for the pansy, as in 
Shakspere, 62. 

Luce, the old name of a pike, 51. 

Lucy, lines on Sir Thomas, 44 (foot- 
note). 

Luddington, village of, where Shak- 
spere was married, 82. 

Macbeth, 107, 113. 
Malone, 24; epigram on, 24 (foot- 
note). 
Malkin, the meaning of, 154. 
Malt, dearth of, in Stratford in 1598, 

40. 
Malta, the Jew of, 138. 



11 



162 



INDEX. 



Mammet, meaning of, 154. 

Marlowe, 145. 

Marston, "dancing," 88. 

Master, use of, in Warwickshire, 
155, 158. 

Meadows, the, round Stratford, 7, 8. 

Men, great, lives of unknown, 3. 

Meon Hill, 68. 

Merry Wives of Windsor, the, 49, 78. 

Midsummer Night's Dream, the, 47, 
77, 80, 81, 82, 95, 145, 150, 155, 
157; date of, 85; tradition about, 
80. 

Mill, Grange, 83. 

Milton, 10, 22, 117. 

Morality, its full signification, 119. 

Morris, nine men's, 105, 155. 

Mortal, meaning of, 155. 

Mountains, modern love of, 10 {foot- 
note). 

Mulberry-tree, Shakspere's, 30. 

Munday, Antony, 101 {footnote). 

New Place, 17, 30; Queen Henrietta 
Maria at, 30 ; bought by Shak- 
spere, 39. 

Nibelungen Lied, unknown author 
of the, 3. 

Niche, meaning of, 152. 

Night, Twelfth, 137. 

Nothing, Much Ado about, 11, 107, 

108, 109. 
Northamptonshire Words, Glossary 

of by Miss Baker, 60 {footnote), 

109, 151, 152, 156. 
Noul, meaning of, 155. 
Novalis, upon Shakspere, 130. 

Oak, Heme's, 69. 

Old, meaning of, in Shakspere and 
the Elizabethan dramatists, 107. 
Oldys MS., the, 78. 
Ophelia, songs of, 99. 
Orchard, Cherry, the, 76. 
Othello, 151, 154, 156. 

Paintings, in the Chapel of the 

Guild at Stratford, 30. 
Paradise Lost, 49. 



Pash, meaning of, 155. 

Patch, meaning of, 155. 

Patriotism, Shakspere's, 132. 

Pear, warden-, mentioned by Shak- 
spere, 96. 

Peb worth, "piping," 89. 

Pedlars' songs, from Shakspere and 
Munday, 101 {footnote). 

Perkes, Clement, 77. 

Pickthanks, meaning of, 155. 

Plato, 122, 123, 142. 

Poet, the reflex of his time, 18, 19, 
141. 

Poets, love of, for flowers, 9, 10. 

Poetry, definition of, 44; what it is, 
74. 

Polyolbion, Drayton's, 8 {footnote). 

Powles, Church of, 30 {footnote). 

Princess, the, 153. 

Prick-eared, meaning of, 111. 

Protestantism, true meaning of, as 
seen in Shakspere, 140. 

Proverbs, in Shakspere, 109 {foot- 
note). 

Provincialisms of Shakspere, 103, 
149. 

Pun, to, meaning of, 156. 

Puritans, the, in Shakspere's day, 
139. 

Purples, long, what they are in 
Hamlet, 60, 105. 

Quat, a, meaning of, 156. 

Quiney, Kichard, letter from, to 

Shakspere, 41. 
Quoth, use of the word in Shakspere 

and Warwickshire, 112. 

Pace, meaning of, 156. 

Radbrook, village of, 81. 

Ravin, meaning of, 156. 

Register, parish, Luddington, 82 ; 
Snitterfield, 64 ; Stratford, 23 ; 
Welford, 83 ; Weston, 76. 

Repository, the Shaksperian, 83 
{footnote), 

Rheon Hill, 56. 

Richter, Jean Paul, 5, 44 ; on Shak- 
spere, 147. 



INDEX. 



163 



Roads, summer, meaning of, 108. 
Rock, Hatton, 55. 
Bother Street, in Stratford, 32. 
Bother, explanation of, as used by 
Shakspere, 32 {footnote). 

Sagg, to, meaning of, 156. 

Salt, meaning of, 156. 

Scenery, local, its effects on a poet, 
6 ; modern love for, 10 (foot- 
note). 

Schlegel on Shakspere's Sonnets, 
145. 

Shakspere, John : his varying cir- 
cumstances, 36, 37 ; his death, 
39. 

Shakspere, William: his life, a col- 
lection of fines and leases, 4 ; 
chief excellence, 1 1, 12 ; his good 
fortune in his birthplace, 5, 6; 
where buried, 21, 22 ; love for 
flowers, 10, 63, 65, 128; deeply 
religious tone of mind, 25, 26, 
27, 137; his sonnets, 3, 27, 145; 
his humour, 124, 125; his love 
for nature, 65, 127, 128; his 
views of life, how affected by 
the age in which he lived, 141, 
142 ; his wide catholic spirit, 
137 ; his patriotism, 132 ; the 
true artist, 133; his Protestant- 
ism, 140; his indifference about 
his works a sign of his true 
greatness, 146. 

Shaksperian Repository, the, 83 
(footnote). 

Sheep, pronunciation of, in Shak- 
spere, 33. 

Shive, meaning of, 156. 

Shog, meaning of, 156. 

Shottery, village of, where Anne 
Hathaway lived, 70. 

Shovel-board, still used in War- 
wickshire, 105, 156. 

Shrew, Taming of the, 107, 109. 

Singer, Mr., the late, 32, 155. 

Skelton, 87. 

Slobberly, meaning of, 109. 

Snitterneld, 64 ; where Shakspere's 



father held some property, 64; 
Bushes, 6.\ 

Sonnets, the, of Shakspere, 3, 27, 
145. 

Spenser, 10, 22. 

Squash, meaning of, 156. 

Stour, river, 81. 

Straight, meaning of, in Hamlet 
112. 

Stratford-upon-Avon, 12 ; meadows 
round, 7, 8; derivation of Strat- 
ford, 14 ; in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, 16, 17 ; Wheler's History 
of, 18 (footnote) ; alehouses in 
Stratford in Shakspere's time, 
18 (footnote); parish church of, 
20 ; college of, 28 ; grammar 
school, 29 ; Chamberlain's ac- 
counts of, 17 (footnote), 35, 36. 

Statute-caps, the name still preserved 
in Warwickshire, 157. 

Sweeting,bitter-, mentioned by Shak- 
spere, 97. 

Taming of the Shrew, the, popular 

tradition about, 77 (footnote), 78, 

107. 
Tempest, the, 104, 109. 
Tills, meaning of, 157. 
Tomes, manor-house of the, 88 ; 

Mr. B. ¥. Tomes, 103 (footnote). 
Tooth, pugging-, explanation of, in 

the Winter's Tale, 106. 
Traditions, their value, 26, 27. 

Ulrici, on Shakspere, 74, 141. 
Urchin, meaning of, 157. 
Utopia, Gonzalo's, 125. 

Venice, Merchant of, the, 107, 108, 

134, 152, 157. 
Venus and Adonis, 47, 48, 127, 149, 

160. 
Vicarage, Weston, 84. 
Virgil, description of the willow by, 

7 (footnote). 

Ward, Bev. John, 87. 
Warden pear, 96 ; cob, 96. 



WW? 



164 



INEfEX. 



Warwickshire, Drayton's description 
of, 8 (footnote); Dugdale's, 31, 
52 (footnote) ; provincialisms, 
103, 149 ; harvest-homes, 99 ; 
orchards, 96. 

Weanlings, meaning of, 152. 

Welcombe, 59. 

Welford, village of, 82; extract from 
. the parish register of, 83. 

Weir-brake, the, 80. 

Weston Sands, 82, 96. 

Wench, used still in its primitive 
signification in the midland dis- 
tricts, 157, 158. 

Wheler, History of Stratford, by, 
18 (footnote) ; collection of Shak- 
sperian papers by, 60 (footnote). 



Whipstock, meaning of, 157. 
Wimpcote, or Wilmecote, where 

Shakspere's mother lived, 68. 
Wincot, village of, mentioned in the 

Taming of the Shrew, 76. 
Windsor, Merry Wives of, 49, 78. 
Winter's Tale, the, 65, 96, 99, 101, 

126, 152, 153, 155, 156. 
Wit, Groat's Worth of, 111. 
Witches, how held in Shakspere's 

day, 139. 
Witch, mankind, meaning of, 104. 
Wixford, " papist," 90. 
Women, Shakspere's, 121. 
Wordsworth, 118, 131. 
Worcester, battle of, 88. 



* London : Printed by Smith, Elder and Co., 15£, Old Bailey, E.G. 



m 



